


Full Stop

by acedie



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Gen, Good Severus Snape, Harry Potter is Bad at Feelings, Mentor Severus Snape, Mild Gore, Not Really Character Death, POV Harry Potter, POV Severus Snape, Severus Snape Has a Heart, Severus Snape Lives, Severus Snape is Bad at Feelings, Snakes, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:29:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 27,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25676617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acedie/pseuds/acedie
Summary: “You foolish child,” he rasped. “Do you really think you’re the first to have had the brilliant idea to jump off the Astronomy Tower?"Neither Harry nor Snape truly expected to live to see the end of the war. Yet here they both are.
Relationships: Harry Potter & Severus Snape, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 88
Kudos: 301
Collections: literally amazing i could read these over and over





	1. before

**Author's Note:**

> you really messed up everything  
> you really messed up everything  
> but you can take it all back again
> 
> truth will mess you up

Looking out from the great height of the Astronomy Tower, he could almost believe that nothing had happened. The Forbidden Forest loomed, as always; the Black Lake was still and calm. You couldn’t see the broken windows peppering the castle; you couldn’t see the empty beds. All you could hear was the soft whistle of the wind sweeping across stone.

Only the white specter of Dumbledore’s Tomb broke the scene, brought it all crashing down again.

At least he’d had the chance to mend it where Voldemort had blasted it open.

Whatever the portrait said, it was done. The wand was with its true master. The stone had, with any luck, been trampled underfoot in the woods, been kicked off into the underbrush where it would remain; his cloak was draped over his bed for Ron to find.

This was, he’d decided while trudging up the stairs, ostensibly for fresh air, the best way to break the power of the wand. Really, the only option. What, he wanted to become an Auror and planned to never lose another fight in his life? Wizards live… a long, long time. Really, an unimaginable, nightmarish span of years spread out before him like a feast in the Great Hall, prepared solely for him, and he couldn’t leave until he’d finished everything, down to the last tart.

So this was the right move, wasn’t it? The cold of the stone parapet underneath him, the wind swirling his hair, the drop--he looked away--the drop below. 

He could give this one last thing, now that he  _ knew _ that Voldemort was gone, had watched him crumple. He hadn’t been able to “move on” without seeing that with his own eyes, but it was done now, wasn’t it? Now he could break the wand’s power and if it was also a selfish thing, a thing he was doing because it all just seemed so exhausting now. Negotiating relationships changed by the war, watching the grief of those families shattered because he had not moved fast enough, the interviews that waited, the expectations from being The Boy Who Lived Again, of having been born to a purpose and having completed that purpose at seventeen and not even beginning to know what came next.

So. So he should do it, shouldn’t he? His throat burned and his stomach was doing cartwheels but this… this was what he should do. He’d slipped away from dinner and nobody had said anything and maybe that was a sign.

Maybe he just needed the excuse.

But he was Harry Potter, and for once in his life, shouldn’t that mean he got to do what he  _ wanted  _ to do instead of what he  _ should _ do?

So he slid off the parapet.

And bounced.


	2. Chapter One

“Oy, Mum! Get the door!”

Ron kicked it for good measure and Harry winced. Both of them had their arms full with takeaway bags from the Muggle fish-and-chips in Ottery St. Catchpole, but the Burrow looked even more rickety than he remembered. He was afraid of what would happen if Ron continued his assault. The fourth floor was already leaning at an alarming angle, and at least one of the chimneys had been sheared off at the second floor.

Mrs. Weasley had made it clear to all three of them that they were welcome to help reclaim the Burrow once they got tired of Hogwarts. Wednesday morning, she’d finally grown tired of Harry’s excuses and threatened to send a Howler if he didn’t at least show up for dinner. Harry wasn’t entirely sure she was joking.

He’d spent the past handful of nights in the dorms and was reluctant to leave, but it felt strange, like trying on his second year robes. He’d outgrown it in the time they’d been on the run. And he found himself, in idle moments, worrying about what he was supposed to do with two of three infamously powerful magical artifacts. The more he worried at the problem, the more his mind resisted and turned to thinking about both the thrill of flying, which he’d missed so much, and just how high the Astronomy Tower was.

So he tried very hard not to be idle.

It was easy at first--he was too tired to think. He had spent a few hours huddled on a stair, stirring only to thank a passing Mediwitch for draping a self-warming blanket over his shoulders. He hadn’t even realized he’d been shivering.

He was only just conscious when Ron and a woman Molly Weasley’s age that he almost recognized breezed up, cleared her throat, and introduced herself as Polita Patil, Senior Secretary to the Acting Minister of Magic. (“Padma and Parvati’s mother,” she’d said with a slight smile, seeing his groggy confusion.)

He thought he was back in the Black Lake, ears full of water, when she told him how concerned they all were when Ronald couldn’t find him that morning. Was it morning again already? Awareness of his body came back to him in slow waves--the ache in his neck, his back, the distant throb of his head. He realized the stair he’d been curled up on had shifted at some point, taken him to some obscure corner of the castle.

“Blimey, Harry, were you trying to give us a heart attack?!” 

Ron swatted the back of his head and sat down next to him on the stair. 

“I thought a Death Eater had snatched you in the night! When I saw your bed was empty and realized you hadn’t been back at all--”

“You realized in the morning...” Harry rubbed the sleep from his eyes, then turned to him with mock innocence. “Where did  _ you _ sleep Ron?”

He blushed and shot a look at Secretary Patil, who obligingly pretended not to have heard.

“You’re lucky your friends had an idea of where to look,” she said as she sat down next to Ron, plucking the hem of her kurta away from his leg. “As Mr. Weasley said, we were concerned Death Eaters would come for the wounded after they scattered. Imagine how the wizarding world would react if--”

“They didn’t and I’m fine,” he said quickly. “Is everyone else okay?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, “even Snape’s pulled through so far. Healer Smethyck--he asked after you, said you met him through Arthur?--said he must have been inoculating himself with Nagini’s venom.”

“Hope I don’t regret sending someone after him,” grumbled Ron.

Patil shot him an indulgent smile. 

“I know how you Gryffindors feel about him.” 

She turned back to Harry.

“Well, now that you’re found, could I trouble you and Ronald to come with me to make a statement for the ministry? I really think it’s best to do when it’s fresh--”

And that had been the next day gone. Statements and interviews and photographs for the Prophet, because wasn’t he the symbol of victory over darkness twice over? And he needed to be seen to prove to everyone that it really was over.

Hogwarts itself needed him. It was a large campus, always at least somewhat dangerous, and who knew what had been knocked loose in the battle? What still lingered down quiet halls? He didn’t want to trust that the Marauder’s Map would be able to warn them--sure, Ron and Hermione must’ve found him with it, but would it cover beasts? And obviously they’d missed Peter Pettigrew all that time, so it couldn’t have been infallible.

After that were the repairs--too many to get through in a day. Shattered windows, cracks in the walls, the missing balustrade of the main stair. Righting the suits of armor. A whole team had been dispatched to put out the Fiendfyre in the Room of Requirement and it still wasn’t out.

Nobody called him out for avoiding the Great Hall. When he got hungry, he went straight down to the kitchens. Even without Dobby there, the house elves were overjoyed to feed him. He was just glad Kreacher seemed to be settling in okay; he shouldn’t be alone.

Now, back at the Burrow, he had that too-tight feeling again. They’d gotten the ground floor mostly set to rights and it looked the same, still cluttered and cozy and lived-in, though he didn’t miss how Ginny stiffened when he came in the door. Hermione gave him a look and he just shrugged helplessly in reply. That was another reason he’d been sticking to the boys’ dorm.

“Thank you Ronald,” Mrs. Weasley said as they started doling out food. “I told you, if you’re going to stay here now that you’re of age you’ll have to help out if you aren’t going back to school for your NEWTS, war hero or not.”

“Yeah yeah yeah,” he grumbled. “Just don’t make me cook.”

Mrs. Weasley had shrunk the table up a little since not everyone was home (though she still left room for the clock, which she still kept within arms reach.) Hermione was there, of course, but Mr. Weasley was back at work, helping put the Ministry back to rights. George had appeared at the foot of the stairs, Summoned his dinner, and slouched back up to Percy’s old room. Nobody needed to ask why he wasn’t in his old room, or at the flat above the joke shop. Charlie was still staying with Bill and Fleur, and Percy was probably holed up at the Ministry with their father.

And of course Ginny was there, off at the far end of the table next to Hermione. A lot of students were still staying with parents, even the fifth and seventh years.

“Harry, I’m so glad you’re here for dinner,” Mrs. Weasley said. “I know it’s not what it used to be, it’s been empty since Easter hols, but if you change your mind about staying, you’re welcome to whichever room is free. Or the sofa, or--or anywhere really, though you’ll have to get the gnomes back out of the broomshed.”

“Yes, thank you Harry,” said Ron, rolling his eyes. “I’m so tired of hearing about it.”

“He can stay where he likes,” broke in Ginny. She still looked down at her plate. “He can do what he likes, where he likes, with whom he likes.” She finally looked up at him, softening a little. “It’s been a long year.”

Harry didn’t miss the arched eyebrow Mrs. Weasley gave to that rather fierce statement. He felt himself blush and started hacking his fillet into smaller and smaller pieces. He’d told Ginny he needed space and though she’d said that was fine, she understood, they’d talk about it more later... he sort of thought she’d taken that to mean he didn’t want to wait for her to finish out her seventh year. He wondered if it was better, would be easier on her, if it was never at all.

“So it has,” Molly finally said softly. “Well. Harry, what are your plans?”

He put down his fork, feeling suddenly nauseous. Plans, right. He had those.

“I dunno. Ron ‘n me had always talked about becoming Aurors, though we do technically need our NEWTS for that.”

“Oh come off it mate,” Ron said crossly. “You killed Voldemort, don’t you think that counts for like, ten of them?”

“I’m still going back,” Hermione said, chin out. Harry got the impression this was not the first time she’d made this pronouncement. “It’s a whole  _ year _ of education and we shouldn’t expect special treatment.”

Ron rolled his eyes in a full-body motion. This was apparently all the two of them needed to kickstart their standing argument about, amongst other things, book-learning vs. practical experience; how much of this was about ease of access to the Hogwarts library; and the crescendo, when they were going to just  _ get married  _ already. 

Normally the bickering didn’t bother him. It was just Ron and Hermione, it was how they worked. And maybe it wasn’t even the bickering that was getting under his skin that night, that pushed at him like a sore tooth. It was how…  _ fine _ they were. And if they weren’t entirely fine yet, he could see that they would be.

He told himself nobody much noticed when he left his plate at the table and slipped off, back to Hogwarts. They didn’t need him moping in the corner.

When he jumped off the tower, what he’d expected was this: a thrilling dive and a sudden stop, like the ground was the Snitch and his team was a hundred points behind. And then whatever came next.

What he got was more like immediately hitting an invisible trampoline and hanging, suspended, as some force almost split him in two, jerking him between two different directions before flinging him through the air toward the Infirmary. He thought he was going to crash into the window when it drifted open just in time and whatever spell had been carrying him set him down gently on his feet inside the curtains of one bed in particular.

Harry thought for a dizzying moment that he was hallucinating, that this, all of this after the forest, had been a fever dream. Because surely this moon-faced figure propped up before him wasn’t--couldn’t be--who he thought he was. 

“Potter,” it croaked, “explain.”

“Prof--Headmaster Snape,” Harry stuttered. “You’re awake.”

Snape hardly looked like he should still be alive, let alone, what, enforcing curfew? His face was pallid and swollen, the deep-dark eyes glittering above purple smudges, the whites blown red. Harry thought he caught a flash of something from Snape, some yawning darkness that echoed the feeling that had brought him up to the tower in the first place, and he shut his eyes against it. He was projecting. Just because Snape was less of a git than he’d thought...

Snape pointed one puffy finger at the window and tilted his head.  _ What did you expect? _ the gesture said.

“I, um. Fell off the Astronomy Tower,” Harry whispered finally. “I needed air, couldn’t sleep, and I slipped. Something, some spell, took me here.”

An expression Harry couldn’t place flashed over Snape’s face, distorted as it was.

“You foolish child,” he rasped. “Do you really think you’re the first to have had the brilliant idea to jump off the Astronomy Tower?”

“What?!” Harry choked out, “I didn’t--”

“Jinxed,” Snape cut him off with a feeble wave of his hand. He selected one of the cornucopia of potions on his bedside table and bolted it down. When he went on, his voice was stronger, smoother. “Delivers the student directly to the headmaster. Spell must’ve confused me and McGonagall. Clearly it’s gone senile.”

“Oh,” he answered faintly. 

He had that feeling again, of rising slowly out of his body and drowning in place. He  _ knew. _ Someone  _ knew.  _ Harry had barely known himself before he’d stumbled up the tower stairs. He really hadn’t been able to sleep. Though once he got there it had seemed like the only natural solution. It was only after he’d already done it that he realized how terrible a choice it was. Oh, sure, he’d be dead, but he’d been expecting that off and on since he was eleven. No, it was how much of a mess he’d be leaving behind.

“Is that ever, you know. Awkward?”

“Unimaginably so,” Snape drawled. “You’d think the Headmaster who spelled it wanted students to die of embarrassment instead of defenestration.” A pause, a dreamy look. “I always meant to do something about that. Dumbledore had no shame and an old man’s prostate.” 

Harry didn’t want to think about that. He didn’t want to think about any of this. Would Madame Pomfrey hear them? Who else was left on the ward? Most casualties had either died outright or been discharged or transferred by now but wasn’t that a terrible thought, being grateful people had died so that he could keep his secrets.

He was struck by another thought. 

“Does that mean--” 

Snape quirked an eyebrow. “That I know from experience, having tried it myself?”

Harry’s chest tightened.

“Yes, Potter. Does that truly surprise you, given what you’ve seen in my memories? Not that I owe you any more of my embarrassing secrets.”

“What happens now?” Harry said softly, terrified of the answer.

Snape closed his eyes for long enough that Harry hoped he’d fallen back to sleep.

“I don’t know any more than you do, Potter. Perhaps even less.” 

He opened one eye and smirked. “Oh, I’m sorry, are you talking about yourself? Naturally, you want to know what I will do with  _ you _ .”

Harry clenched his hands.

“I take it from your pathetic attempt at evasion that you do not want this known?”

Harry shook his head violently. His mouth felt sealed shut. He thought the shame might kill him, if nothing else. They’d call him mad, selfish; worse, they’d bundle him away to live with Alice and Frank Longbottom. If he was lucky the articles in the Prophet would be sympathetic but infantilizing. If he was not...

“Promise me you will make no further attempt until I have been discharged.”

“I promise,” he said quickly. “Yes, absolutely.” Just don’t tell anyone, he said silently.

“Then go back to bed, Potter,” Snape replied, settling back. “Before Poppy comes for us both.”


	3. Chapter Two

“This is a terrible idea, Severus. You’re an absolute fool if you think I’m going to let you--”

“You aren’t  _ letting me _ do anything, Poppy,” he spat, glaring up at her. He was perched on the edge of the hospital bed, and though he’d demanded a set of crisp black robes as soon as he reckoned he could stand, they could not hide just how pale he still was, nor the deep purple shadows under his eyes. “I am not under arrest. I am going home whether you like it or not.”

She huffed and cast a guilty look at the Auror guarding the fireplace. “The Ministry could send an army of Dementors for you and I would not release you from my care. It hasn’t even been a week and you should be  _ dead  _ from how you looked when they brought you in--”

He stifled a hiss and levered himself to his feet. She was right. He knew she was right, even if he didn’t remember much after Potter had gathered up his memories and left. Only flashes and sensations remained: the burning, screaming pain of the bite and its venom; the growing numbness, the relief of his body weakening and losing track of his extremities; the hot spike of someone jostling him as they levitated him into the infirmary. But what he remembered most clearly of all was the look on Poppy’s face when she saw him, presumably before news of his true allegiance had spread.

She’d seen him, torn apart and bloody and limp, and she had looked so satisfied. 

Oh, she had treated him all the same. He lived. And Potter had told his side of the story, and then he had told his, and now everyone would collectively pretend the past year had not happened. That they did not hate him still, on some level, for what he had done for them. 

He could not stay, knowing all that.

He swayed but steadied himself, and peeled her hand off his arm like a dirty wrapper. First the fireplace, to St. Mungo’s. Then Cokeworth.

_ Too far, that was too far _ \--Snape fell to his knees on the threadbare rug of his parlor, back at Spinner’s End, trying to choke down the fit of coughing that threatened to tear his throat back open.  _ You absolute fool-- _

He pressed a hand to his neck and clenched with his whole body, locking himself down, whitewashing his mind as he would before responding to a summons from Voldemort. The late-night chat with Potter; the marathon statement for the ministry; the magical strain of _a_ _trip across the bloody country, you moron_ , it had all been too much; Poppy must have snuck him an extra Invigorating Draught and now it had worn off _or you just got exsanguinated by a fucking venomous snake you twat_ and he realized his breath was coming in shallower and shallower; he thought of the small potions bench downstairs--downstairs! how was he to get downstairs!

No. No. A blank canvas; a wide open field; the  _ hush _ of calm ocean waves against a pristine white beach. In and out, down to his diaphragm and out. He crawled to the worn couch and heaved himself up with a cry.

_ A week ago you could fly without a broom, _ he thought wryly.  _ Now you can barely sit up. _ Unfortunately his bedroom was upstairs; his brewing equipment and stash of restorative draughts downstairs. He had not truly prepared his house to be a bolt-hole; he had not even prepared it for the start of term and his long absence.

He had not expected to be back.

He wasn’t sure how he felt about being wrong. He’d have to clean, both himself and the house: he could feel the fine layer of dust that had settled on his skin, already tacky-feeling from six days of only Scouring Charms and sponge baths. He’d need to Transmogrify the couch into… perhaps a daybed. Acquire food. Figure out a solution for the bathroom, which was also upstairs; maybe the lavatory out in the yard..?

The bed, first. The rest could wait.

_ The Astronomy Tower, the cold stone parapet, the roof above giving scant protection from the oppressive weight of starlight, bright and cold, turning the craggy Scottish highlands into a stark charcoal sketch.  _

_ Lily is lost to him. He cannot turn from his path because if he refuses his Housemates now, they will make his life even more miserable than Potter and his crew. He has almost been killed by a werewolf that the Headmaster protects; it is clear Gryffindor lives are more valuable than Slytherin.  _

_ He cannot, will not, go home. He remembers scratching relentlessly at his arms at seven, filled with a droning despair; counting out, at eight, before ever seeing Lily, twenty pills from his father’s bottle of paracetamol and thinking, with a child’s surety, that it was so many, that it must be enough.  _

_ No, he cannot go back to his father’s anger and his mother’s silence. Stuffing himself into that too-small space. _

_ He sits on the parapet. He cannot bear the thought of another night outside the Fat Lady’s portrait. _

_ The wind through his hair. The cold stone below. His throat, burning with unshed tears,  _ a snake bite.  _ He refuses to wake up another morning, full of dread.  _

_ So. He slides. _

_ In 1976, he had drifted sedately down, through an open window and down a mercifully empty hall, only to be plunked down at Albus’s feet. In the staff bathroom closest to his office. When he came back as a professor and then as Headmaster himself, he could never bring himself to use it. There had been a talk, a series of potions, a tearful confrontation with his mother that was almost as bad as surviving in the first place. _

_ Now, he plummets, he blinks, and he is swept into the Headmaster’s Office itself, and there Albus sits not as he was then but as he is  _ now _ , as a shrivelled, nightmarish thing, beard and hair falling off in chunks, milky eyes. _

_ “Got you in the end, didn’t I?” the figure cackles. “All that work, all those years, and Lily’s boy follows you off the tower in the end!” _

_ It points one blackened finger behind Severus and he whirls, and there’s Harry, barely recognizable, hardly more than a pile of meat with a mop of unruly dark hair, white bone and red marrow screaming out in the darkness. A clawed hand sears across his neck and blood gouts out and oh, he deserves this, he thinks, sinking down-- _

A knock at the door.

Severus tumbled down to the floor, black spots dancing in his vision. He fought to get in air, could feel his throat closing in and told himself to occlude, occlude, occlude; a calm cool sea lapping a white smooth beach, a calm cool sea…

He had just enough time to pull himself back onto the daybed before the knock came again, more insistently. He pulled in a deep breath, twirled his wand--and the door opened with a squawk.

In swept Minerva McGonagall. It was a testament to how off-balance he truly was that he let his jaw drop.

“Do you let just anyone into your house?”

He snapped his jaw shut and draped spindly arms over the wrought-iron back of the daybed, as if he was just casually lounging. She perched neatly on top of the armchair, but not before sending the accumulated pile of dishes from the last time he’d been home into the kitchen sink with a sweep of her wand. Damn it, he was  _ not _ going to blush in front of this woman.

“If you were a mob of vengeance-bent Death Eaters I doubt you’d be knocking first, madam.”

She pushed up her sharp-framed glasses and pinched her nose underneath. Rather than responding, she swirled her wand and summoned a tea service. As if their last interaction had not been her flinging a swarm of daggers at him, and him fleeing out the window. As if he hadn’t sat in the infirmary, first guarded by Aurors, and then guarded only by Poppy, who barely looked at him until forced to, when she tried to stop him from leaving.

“Are we not on a first name basis after all?” she asked, examining him as a cat would a mouse. “Our last meeting wasn’t exactly friendly.”

“Yes, well,  _ Minerva _ ,” he drawled, picking up one of the potion bottles littering his small coffee table and dumping it into his cup. He was fairly certain it was an Invigorating Draught. He figured he’d need it for this conversation. “I suppose I should thank you for not immediately springing to the Killing Curse.”

“I will not apologize for defending students.” He caught the way her hand tightened around her cup. “But I do… regret not giving you the benefit of the doubt. And for not--not seeing you sooner.”

He caught the way her eyes lingered on the thick bandage across his neck.

“You’ve been rather busy, I expect. It’s only just been a full week, yes? And besides, I killed Dumbledore.” He savored her wince. “I do not blame you for taking that at face value. It only means I did my job well.”

“All the same.”

They both drank.

“Minerva, why are you here?”

She sighed in relief--he imagined she was as grateful to be released from the burden of polite small talk as he was.

“I have good news and I have bad news. The board of governors had an emergency session--at least of those still alive and not under You-Know-Who’s power. I won’t beat around the bush. You’re retired.”

She pulled out a length of parchment with a sloppy seal affixed at the bottom.

“Here’s all the paperwork. Please sign and return within thirty days, and let me know if you have any questions. It should be fairly clear--for once they didn’t waste time with legalese. You will receive a lump sum of 20,000 galleons and a full pension based on your status as Headmaster, not professor. A house elf will be by with your personal effects and your portrait.”

He unfurled it; his eyes passed over the length quickly.

“Headmistress McGonagall? Congratulations,” he said flatly.

She only inclined her head.

“What’s the bad news?”

Another moment to savor--Minerva looked gobsmacked herself for just a second, before a wry smile stole across her face.

“I forget sometimes that you never truly wanted to teach.”

“Only the brats who didn’t want to learn,” he responded automatically. This was an old conversation, familiar territory.

“Even so. The board--I am--grateful for what you did. Balancing between the Carrows and the children.”

He finished his tea and cocked his head to the side, as if to say,  _ Yes, and? _

She sighed again. He realized, with a start, that she was  _ old _ . She’d seemed an old woman to him in 1971, when he’d started Hogwarts. But he’d been a professor himself now for more than fifteen years. (Emphasis on the had been, apparently.) And yet he had not noticed how deeply etched the lines in her face were. How the skin of her hands had thinned. How much of a chance had  _ she _ had to recover, after his first dramatic flight from Hogwarts?

She was formidable still, of course. He had struggled to duel her, not just because he was trying his damnedest not to kill her while she had no such compunctions herself, but because she was  _ formidable _ .

Perhaps Nagini’s venom had addled his brains, made him soft. Perhaps he should have mercy.

“We both did what we had to in order to win the war. I agree with the board. Hogwarts does not need me stalking the halls right now, even if I was capable. Now. The ‘good news’?”

She made her hands busy pouring them both more tea, though her own cup was still half-full. 

“Of course. Well. Don’t consider this official, but Shacklebolt is pushing to make sure you aren’t brought up on charges, given your role and Albus’s directions. Harry was quite emphatic that the memories you gave him would clear your name if the portrait did not.”

“Was he?” Snape replied quietly, neutrally, placing the teacup with a delicate  _ tink _ onto the silver platter. “I suppose my own testimony would be insufficient. Was he just as enthusiastic about sharing those memories?”

“No. In fact he was quite concerned about who actually  _ needed _ to view them. Give the boy some credit, Severus, he’s had little enough privacy himself. He seems to want to respect yours.”

“You’re right,” he replied faintly. “The boy is full of surprises, isn’t he.”

God be damned, he hadn’t done anything about Potter, had he? Not yet. Hadn’t even thought of him. (His occlumency slips and there’s the dream again--what was red and white and splattered all over the headmaster’s office?) 

Should he tell Minerva? He was clearly a poor excuse for a responsible adult--the spell was senile indeed if it had picked him over McGonagall. What a joke it would be if Potter ended up dead through his negligence after all.

And yet. Would he have wanted Minverva to know, all those years ago? Would he have wanted Slughorn? And he’d pried into the boy’s mind in that vulnerable moment when he realized where he was; he hadn’t picked up on any immediate plan. He hoped that meant that it was, indeed, just an impulse that the boy had acted upon in a vulnerable moment.

Or perhaps he wanted an excuse to hide the mere fact that the great Severus Snape had forgotten something important.

“Severus? Are you alright?”

He blinked. How long…?

“Don’t answer that, I know what you’re going to say,” she said. She looked pointedly around the parlor--at the ancient post on the floor, the mats of dust in the corners, the untidy stacks of books that he had picked up, attempted to read, and put down. His laundry, thankfully, was piled out of sight in the powder room.

“I’ll send a house elf, since you clearly aren’t picking up after yourself.” She raised a hand to cut him off. “Just until you’re recovered.”

“ _ Fine _ ,” he spat. “But just until then. Will that be all? Any more  _ news _ for me?”

She rolled her eyes and Vanished the tea set. 

“There’s no shame in needing help, Severus. Have the good grace to accept it when it’s offered. I’ll see myself out.”

He watched her go as if he didn’t quite take her at her word. When he heard her Apparate away, he Summoned a quill and parchment. It was past time that he invited Potter over to discuss their shared appreciation for Astronomy.


	4. Chapter Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Trouble has its way of finding you, Harry. You don’t need to go looking for it. Don’t forget what I told you about wrackspurts.”

Harry spent one more night in the dorms. Or tried to--he did more blank staring and restless turning than actual sleeping. At least at the Leaky Cauldron nobody else had to hear, and he still fondly remembered that quiet month before third year when he’d stayed upstairs.

He crept in under the Cloak, same as last time, when he and Ron and Griphook had broken into Gringotts. It was almost unrecognizable: it was packed, roaring; candles flickered cheerily just under the ceiling and someone had taken up a fiddle enthusiastically, if not well, in the center of the room.

He thought he may have killed Tom the barman when he tapped him on the shoulder out of thin air, but he pulled down the hood long enough to flick his hair away from his forehead and press a finger to his lips. Tom’s wizened walnut face cracked into a wide smile.

It turned out that Room 11, where he’d stayed before, was unavailable, but 10, right at the top of the stair, was. He thought he might be better off closer to the exit, so that was fine. And it wasn’t that much different than how he remembered 11--a squishy bed right in the middle, a fireplace cold in the June heat, blond oak furniture with the edges softened by decades of traffic.

He still cast the litany of protective enchantments the trio had used in the Forest of Dean, and hid under the Cloak.

He was a little surprised when Luna Lovegood agreed to meet him that Sunday afternoon for tea in Muggle London (protected as they were by a quick  _ Muffliato _ .) He didn’t give her much notice and he thought--well, surely she’d be busy? 

But there she was, blinking at him serenely in a surprisingly normal-looking outfit (for wizards at least--he didn’t see anyone else in a tulle ballerina skirt and Union Jack muscle tee but in London especially, no one would give her a second look).

“It’s wonderful to see you, Harry, but I can’t stay long,” she said. “My father doesn’t like me gone longer than an hour.”

“Oh, yeah, of course,” he replied. “You know I maybe could have asked him all this, but--”

“I can see why you wouldn’t,” she said somberly. “But it all worked out in the end, didn’t it?”

He supposed that was true, no thanks to him.

“Anyway, Luna, I thought--did you hear what I was telling Voldemort, about the Elder Wand?”

“Oh everyone heard that.”

“Er--right, of course they did. Well, the thing is--I don’t want it. I have my wand back, and from what everyone says about it, it’s sort of cursed, isn’t it? Metaphorically. Maybe literally. I don’t know.”

Luna tilted her head to the side. “Why are you asking me, Harry?”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “I dunno, I thought--well. I guess I wanted a second opinion and, well, you’re smart, Luna, you have great ideas.” Merlin, he felt like an idiot.

But all Luna did in response was hum and ask, “What did you want to do then?”

“I want to break its power. I wanted to put it somewhere safe, but…”

“I understand perfectly. Silverblight is notoriously difficult to purge from unattended wands and oh, one so powerful as that…!”

Harry coughed and agreed.

“Well. Have you tried just snapping it?”

Oh.  _ Oh _ . Why  _ not  _ break it? They’d broken six Horcruxes. Why not a wand?

It was--nice. No one knew he was The Boy Who Lived here; Luna treated him like she always did. She told him about her father’s plans for the next Quibbler issue. She’d found a natterjack toad by the creek. It was just… nice.

He thanked her before they parted, or tried to--she stopped him and said, “Ollivander told me something when I told him he’d gone to too much trouble, making me a whole new wand. He told me that helping someone is a gift to yourself as well. So thank  _ you.” _

“Ugh,” Harry moaned, clutching his stomach. He’d never get used to travel by Portkey--he’d have to ask Hermione if there was some kind of universal law that magical travel had to be accompanied by intense motion sickness.

He took a moment to catch his bearings. The house on Spinner’s End wasn’t… exactly what he had expected. It and the unit next door--which had been secured with a realtor’s lockbox, though he doubted any agent would be able to show it--radiated the kind of don’t-look-at-me-ness he associated with Grimmauld Place. But it was just a bog-standard two-down, two-up rowhouse, at least from the outside, with soot-etched windows and a roof that had seen better days.

“Having second thoughts?”

Harry whipped around, wand at the ready. He didn’t feel much better when Snape sizzled into view, having ended the Disillusionment Charm. 

This Snape was better health-wise, Harry decided, but more alarming, because this Snape was ambulatory. His face looked more shrivelled than swollen, his hair still hanging like damp curtains down to his shoulders; his eyes had faded to the kind of glassy and pink they turned with poor sleep rather than the blown blood vessels of trauma. His neck was still covered, though, by the high collar of his normal robes and a hint of a bandage. 

“What are you doing out here?”

Snape gave his wand a twirl in response and stalked toward the front door. “Making sure it’s you and not just something shaped like you. Come in.”

The inside was closer to what he’d expected: Dim, brutally tidy, smelling faintly of linseed oil and lemon. Where his office at Hogwarts had been dominated by ghastly little jars, his home was overwhelmed by books: hundreds, completely lining the walls, floor to ceiling, mostly bound in dark leather and a few further confined to chipboard boxes. He definitely, definitely did not startle when one thumped when he looked too long.

Snape folded himself into the armchair and gestured to the couch. “Sit, Potter, don’t gawk.”

He waited just a beat, then went on.

“This is how these meetings are to go. You will come here once a week. Eventually we will transition to once a fortnight. Then once a month, and eventually angels will sing and you will never darken my doorstep again.”

Harry grimaced. He’d wanted to meet and explain all this away but it was clear Snape was invested, for some ungodly reason, in his recovery, even now that Voldemort was dead. But--he glanced around the room again. It was not a space built to welcome company, clearly, and the potions master looked wretched. He remembered what Luna had told him. Maybe this was something he could do  _ for _ Snape. Let him help.

Snape handed him a clear glass marble with a tiny figurine of a green snake suspended inside, gone cloudy with age. It flashed green as soon as his skin made contact, though he was half disappointed when the snake didn’t give a wiggle as well. That would be the half-hysterical side of his brain, the half that insisted that this was definitely a dream and definitely not happening.

“You will keep this with you. I will know if you do not. It will alert me if it senses you intend to take action to take your life--it functions similarly to a Sneakoscope and one of those charming coins Granger cooked up. Tap twice with your wand if you feel you may harm yourself. I have its twin and it will alert me. I will lower my Anti-Apparition charm for ten minutes. If you do not appear within those ten minutes, I will find you.” 

He paused and looked abruptly away. “I wish to be clear that, had you been a normal student and I, a responsible instructor, you would have been admitted that night to the infirmary for monitoring. Or the long-term ward at St. Mungo’s. Or--Bedlam, hell. Anything other than left to your own devices.

“But. Here we are.”

Harry nodded and slipped the marble into a pocket with his wand.

“So. What happens now?” he asked.

Snape heaved a sigh and flicked his wand over his shoulder; a panel of shelves creaked open, revealing a kitchen that was similarly bare and looked like it hadn’t been updated since the 20’s. A clattering tray of small potion vials drifted in to plink down on the coffee table.

“Are you familiar with the muggle medicine Prozac?”

Harry stiffened. 

“I’m not crazy!”

Snape palmed his forehead and audibly prayed for patience.

“I will take that as a ‘sort of’. Potter, wizards and muggles both don’t seem to treat ailments of the mind as seriously as ailments of the flesh, but there is no shame in treating either. This is a seven-day course of Elixir of Equanimity. It’s a close cousin of the Elixir to Induce Euphoria--which you should be familiar with. One vial a day, preferably over food.  _ Don’t  _ bother taking them all at once--you will survive and you will regret it."

Harry nudged the tray with the end of his wand, scowling. The vials wobbled.

"That night was a--a one-off, it won't happen again. I don't." He stopped, began again, "I don't see why I need this."

"You're perfectly welcome to remain in denial and not take them," Snape replied, smacking Harry's hand. "Stop that. I'm not a bloody psychotherapist, Potter, I don't have anything else to offer you. Kreacher will gladly gobble up your secrets."

"Fine," Harry muttered. "Wouldn't expect you to be interested in my stupid problems."

He very carefully did not look at Snape; the last thing he wanted was to have him digging around in his head again.

"Do you  _ want _ me to be interested, Potter?" he said slowly.

He clamped his mouth shut and was again careful to look above Snape's head rather than directly at him. Was he being that transparent, that pathetically needy? It was so brutally unfair that  _ Snape  _ was the only person who knew.

"Oh no. Oh no, Potter, you can't be serious. Is that what you were expecting? A chaise lounge and a heart-to-heart?"

“That’s what Muggles do, isn’t it? I don’t. I can’t--I can’t  _ do it  _ anymore,” he finally cried out, bending forward at the waist. “I can’t do it anymore and I don’t  _ want _ to--to keep feeling like this, and anyone else I tell, it’s just going to upset them and you know already so that’s done and you don’t even like me, so it isn’t like you’ll think any less of me--”

" _ Fuck  _ me," Snape sighed. Harry didn't think he sounded angry, for once; just tired. "Fine. Just… contain yourself."


	5. Chapter Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Severus wondered what he’d done in a past life to deserve this. Had he insulted Merlin’s mother? Kicked Salazar Slytherin in the balls? Because he was surely not equipped to handle this moody, emotionally traumatized teenager (despite that literally having been his job for almost two decades).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning for the italicized dream section for snakes

Severus wondered what he’d done in a past life to deserve this. Had he insulted Merlin’s mother? Kicked Salazar Slytherin in the balls? Because he was surely not equipped to handle this moody, emotionally traumatized teenager (despite that literally having been his job for almost two decades).

Not this teenager.

Potter pulled himself up so that he was only slouching on the couch (no longer a daybed; he would drag himself up the stairs to his own room if it killed him), still staring with that pugnacious expression somewhere over his left shoulder. Snape was tempted to dig around in the boy’s head again--he’d done a surface-level examination but he’d missed something, clearly, as the boy was off his rocker. Not because of whatever had driven him off the Astronomy Tower, but because he was looking to  _ Snape _ to talk him through it.

“Alright,” he breathed. “But why me? Surely there must be someone else--”

“No!” Harry squawked, “No. You can’t… I can’t tell anyone else. And… if it ends up in the Prophet. God, I really would have to kill myself if it ended up in the Prophet, I couldn’t--”

Snape snorted. Harry broke off, ruffled his hair, and continued.

“And, well. You  _ know _ . How I feel. Cause you’ve been there, right? And… You’re still here. You’ve made it. Just the fact that you’re still bloody alive… My parents, Dumbledore, Sirius, Remus, Tonks. All gone. The Weasleys already lost a son. Hogwarts is--the professors are busy. And it isn’t like I could go find a muggle therapist, could I? They’d lock me up for sure.”

“They might be right to.”

Harry shot him an affronted look--clearly he wasn't supposed to agree.

“If they thought you were a danger to yourself or others. An immediate danger. I will do the same, Potter, don’t be mistaken. You should’ve spent the night in the infirmary a month ago.”

Severus clamped his mouth shut against the sudden urge to cough. This had been more speaking than he’d been expecting to do; he’d wanted to deliver his speech, load the boy up on potions, and then shove him off on his way.

“As I said,” he continued after mastering himself once more, “I am not a psychotherapist. I make no promises this will go any better than the occlumency lessons, though if you put in the effort, I will be... civil, if you do the same.”

Severus permitted himself a thin, dry cough to fill the silence. Neither of them wanted to linger on that particular debacle, not if they weren’t going to end up strangling each other. 

“Are you hungry? I’ve kept you long enough, I suppose I should feed you, boy.”

He levered himself up and off the armchair, closing his eyes against the wave of dizziness. He grit his teeth and led Potter into the cramped kitchen, motioning him toward a battered blond dining set.

He was blessedly quiet as Severus put together a small spread. He thought Potter, too, was grateful for the break from all the... emotions. A few scones and clotted cream from the antique icebox his mother had charmed; a fresh pot of tea with milk and honey. (“Better for the throat,” he’d said to Potter’s puzzled expression.) 

It  _ was  _ remarkable how this was going, compared to those lessons in the dungeon. He had tried then too, of course. Perhaps not very hard, he could now admit. And when it had all fallen apart and he’d thrown the boy out in rage--better rage than shame--he could tell himself that it would make it easier with Voldemort. Occlumency improved when it drew upon a kernel of truth and he couldn’t very well feel sympathetic to his master’s nemesis.

He now marveled at how little he felt when he looked at Potter--as if something had been burned out of him by the snake’s venom, lying there. Even now that Harry was just a handful of years younger than his father when he died. He could see James alright, but there was more of Lily than he had realized.

“These are… good? Really good.” Harry sounded too confused for it to be a compliment.

“I’ve gotten into baking in my retirement,” Severus responded dryly. He nibbled at his own but mostly leaned against the apron sink, watching Potter. 

“Your what?”

“Are you deaf Potter?” he replied, but without any bite to it. “Hogwarts is done with me and I am done with it.”

Harry seemed to need a moment to digest this. 

“What’re you gonna do now?”

“An excellent question Potter, one I that I am sure you are asking yourself.”

Snape busied himself back in the icebox. His mother’s spellwork had not just been for cooling, but general preservation; it served as an excellent medicine cupboard as well. He choked down three potions and did not further elaborate. 

“Shacklebolt’s taking Ron on as an Auror. Well, trainee, anyway. That was always the plan, no thanks to you.”

Severus quirked an eyebrow. “Don’t blame me for your academic failure, or for Slughorn’s low standards. Or do you finally admit to expecting favoritism?”

“But--it’s not fair in the first place! Almost  _ nobody _ got an ‘O’!”

Severus’s voice dropped to nearly a whisper. 

“Being an Auror is not just charging recklessly at your enemies and flinging dark spells. Potions are  _ dangerous.”  _ He thrust one of the empty bottles toward Harry. “This, Potter, is a bottle of Cathbert’s Coughing Cure. Brewed correctly, it does what you might expect. If you brew it incorrectly, you may still cure your cough. But it shall be because your diaphragm stops working and you suffocate. And that’s not even the worst way that potion can fail. 

“Can you not imagine a situation where you’d need to identify a potion in the field, in an emergency? Or that you may be called upon to determine when a potion has been deliberately sabotaged, or has just been brewed by an incompetent?”

Harry’s face fell. 

“Yes,” he whispered. “I suppose I can.”

Snape swept the empty bottles and Potter’s plate into the sink. Not so emotionless after all, you dunce, he thought to himself savagely, couldn’t even last--

“You may think me cruel,” he interrupted himself, still hunched like a broken scarecrow over the sink. “You might even be right. But the world is cruel. And magic is no exception.”

Severus was afraid that he’d blown the whole thing. That the boy would storm out, and do something rash, and this tentative truce they’d declared would dissolve because of his--his emotional incontinence.

“You’re right.” 

Potter’s voice was still soft but he did not hesitate.

“You’re right a lot of the time, actually, even if you’re a git about it.”

Severus turned bonelessly, face slack.

“Did I tell you what happened to--to Dumbledore, before you… killed him?”

Severus sat down across from Potter as he spun out the whole tale--the cave, the Drink of Despair, Regulus. He held his tongue, only providing little nudges to get the boy back on track. He got the sense that this was the first time he’d told the story in its entirety--not edited for the Ministry. 

It was chilling how close everything had come to unraveling, and he told Potter that. If Dumbledore had been wrong about the number of Horcruxes. If Voldemort had made an example of him, or if Harry hadn’t accepted the memories. If Neville hadn’t killed the damn snake. So much left up to chance, no matter how confident the portrait had been even after the man’s death.

And the stone. He shut his eyes and briefly entertained the thought of combing the woods--but no. He’d made his choice and he’d relinquished any claim on her.

He buried the thought, like so many others.

“So much left to chance, even with all Dumbledore’s planning… If he was wrong about the number of Horcruxes. If Voldemort had kept the snake protected after my--well. If Voldemort had decided to make an example of me. If you had been there, in the Shack, or if you had not accepted my memories.”

Potter startled. “Oh! I never gave them back to you. Did the Ministry--”

“I have an appointment,” he replied shortly, allowing the boy to be diverted from the old man. “It’s considered bad form to keep them any longer than absolutely necessary.”

“Why?”

“In the short term? It feels like the ghost of a memory,” Snape mused. “Just a hazy outline in a fog, the details lost. Left long enough, it will be like a book with a section ripped out. It may be referenced, but there’s nothing there. Just a hole.”

“That’s a bit melodramatic,” said Harry before clamping his hands over his mouth. “Did I say that out loud?”

Snape barked out a laugh. “Are you just now realizing?”

Harry looked at him, wide-eyed, before venturing a tiny smile. Clearly he had expected to be throttled. Severus still wasn’t entirely sure he didn’t want to, but… Merlin, he missed just  _ talking _ to someone. Minerva had told him the same thing after sitting in on one of his early first-year classes.

“Actually, sir, I wanted to ask you something,” Harry said. “About his wand.”

He pulled it out from his robe somewhat sheepishly and placed it on the kitchen table. Snape indulged himself with a quick fantasy of grabbing it, Stunning Potter, and running. He quashed the thought, though--chasing power hadn’t done him much good in the end, after all. After all, where had it gotten him? Back in his father’s house without a job, hiding from both Death Eaters and his former colleagues.

“I want to destroy it,” Harry went on. “That was one of the things Dumbledore messed up--I’m the master of the wand, yeah? I think he believed that if he died without having been beaten, it would just be a regular wand. But there was Draco and then I Disarmed him and now I just… don’t want to have to worry about it anymore. I thought… I thought if  _ I _ died...” 

He stopped and they both winced.

“So I tried snapping it instead but no luck,” he finished it in a rush, gesturing toward the obviously whole wand.

“I don’t think I like where this is going, Potter,” Snape said slowly.

“Well. I was thinking… I don’t have the sword. But--maybe Fiendfyre? I mean it’s wood. And it would’ve worked on a Horcrux so why not?”

Snape blinked.

“You wish to me summon nigh-uncontrollable cursed fire  _ at my own house _ on the off-chance it will burn a mystical artifact that grants its master untold power. Power that you do not want.”

“Well when you put it like that…”

“And you want to just do this now, do you?”

“Err--”

“Oh why the hell not,” he sighed. Maybe they’d burn the whole street down and neither of them would have to worry about any of this mess. “The Todds are usually at work this time of day anyway and we can’t have you just walking around with the damn thing.”

He led Harry out to the yard. It was about the width of the house, all walled in by thick concrete, with a little outhouse in the back from when the rowhouse was first built, half-swallowed by ivy. The weeds were flammable; perhaps the packed dirt, if it came to that. He sprayed it all down via Aguamenti anyway.

“Put the wand in the middle, as far away from everything as you can. And stay back.”

Snape rolled his neck, shook out his arm, and told himself this was not a colossally bad idea. He centered himself and cast the spell, focusing his will through the hawthorne wand. A  _ whumph _ of ignition, a blast of heat and steam, and then a coil of tiny ruby serpents and dragons raced trailing steam toward the Elder Wand. The air shimmered around ot and the ground smoked and the wand shot off a fountain of sparks when the maelstrom hit, almost seemed to wail in agony and oh it was a pleasure, a pleasure to burn, to grow, to  _ feed, _ what else--

He cut the spell off with a snarl and staggered back, would have fallen without Potter. The boy was saying something but he didn’t catch it, could only feel the hot vice of pain at his temples, and when he wiped the sweat from his face he realized his nose was bleeding. 

Snape pushed his way back into the kitchen and went straight for the tap. He splashed his face, both to rinse away the blood and cool himself. Even constrained, Fiendfyre was unnaturally hot. Even Potter was red in the face. He was surprised the palm of his wandhand wasn’t burned.

He lowered himself into the chair before his legs gave out.

“Dumbledore never would’ve done  _ that _ .”

Snape barked out a laugh. “Dumbledore would never have given up the wand in the first place.”

The boy opened his mouth and then seemed to immediately think better of it.

“You know, you never answered me before,” Potter said instead. “What you’re gonna do. Other than fixing your yard, I guess, it’s sort of… got a crater in the middle now.”

“You’ve been keeping me busy enough,” Snape scowled. Give them an inch and they take a mile. Now the boy wanted to ask questions?

“Yeah but like. What are you… going to  _ do _ ? You’re not even 40, what are--”

“Do I need to have a use, Potter?” Severus grumbled. “Do  _ you _ need to have a use to be a worthwhile person?”

He halted, blushed. “‘Spose not.”

“For now just be grateful I will be at your beck and call.”

He paused, then continued with what he hoped was a smile, “Though, if you’d like to return the favor, I have an idea. One you may find interesting, if expensive.”

_ He considers the small bottle of Dreamless Sleep. It is dangerous to slingshot from Invigoration to Dreamless, but needs must. He does not have the capacity, during the day, to do what he feels he must. And yet, when he closes his eyes, he does not stop seeing. Asleep or awake. _

_ Case in point. He knows he is dreaming as he sweeps his gaze over the four tables of the Great Hall. It is filled with the nervous energy unique to the Opening Feast--the muggleborns are dazzled by the brilliant unknown, and the wizarding children have an idea of what to expect from the next seven years of their lives but not where they’ll be spending it.  _

_ He sits next to Charity, though he’s done this less and less as the war approaches. Except he’s the headmaster now, isn’t he? And Charity is dead, jerking and jostling around in a semblance of life as Nagini swells up and around her torso, slowly working a mouth full of wickedly sharp recurved fangs around the body.  _

_ He knows how sharp they are. _

_ She speaks in Dumbledore’s voice, asks, Have you grown to care for the boy, after all? _

_ And when it had been Dumbledore asking him, he’d redirected, pulled to the surface of his mind the regret, the guilt, the bruising ache of loss, the deep shame of running from one master to the next, just a starving, desperate cur. What he’d buried was this: he is so much her son. I could not let myself see it. _

_ The wound in his neck peels open, gouts blood, bright artereal red, and it is the only thing with any color left. _

Severus hadn’t been entirely honest with the boy. He did have an appointment with Magical Law Enforcement. Except the ministry diverted him for the first at the last moment--an irritable school owl named Erasmus had shown up just the evening before with a terse note telling him that when they’d taken his memories, they’d just taken the whole damn Pensieve, and dumped it back where it came from when they were done. And since he’d taken his home off of the Owl Post network, they couldn’t be blamed for the short notice.

When Minerva had told him he was functionally fired, it hadn’t felt real. Now, Flooing into the Headmistress’s Office, it sank in that this might well be the last time he’d set foot in the castle walls. He almost said as much to her when she rounded the desk to greet him but she pulled him into a stiff embrace before he could open his mouth.

“You still look like a pile of troll dung, Severus. Do I need to send an army of house elves after you? Is one not enough?”

“Lovely to see you too, Minerva,” he groused. He was glad he’d had a chance to rest after the Fiendfyre--not that he’d ever admit that it had been a  _ bad _ idea, exactly. Just an expedient way of removing one of the boy’s triggers.

Minevera led him right to the cabinet. He spared a glance toward Fawkes’s empty perch--who knew where the bird was now. The portraits were mostly sleeping or elsewhere, though Dumbledore gave him a cheery wave, which he ignored. His own was still wrapped in paper in the basement, along with his other personal effects. He was tempted to leave it there to moulder in the dark.

He twirled the silvery threads of memory out of the bowl and back into a bottle--he had very little interest in putting them back in his head outside the sanctity of his home. Even if she hadn’t seen them, and wouldn’t necessarily know what he was putting back in his head, it felt too personal.

“Have you had a chance to come up with what you’re going to do?” asked Minerva with a little smirk. “Find a wife and settle down? You’d have to tell me when you have a child so I know when to retire.”

He affected a shudder. “Merlin, no. First off, you realize I’ve taught most of the eligible single witches in Britain?”

“Ah, Severus, all the more reason to retire to Spain and live on the beach! I’ll mention it to Longbottom, give him more ideas for boggart defense.”

He laughed and slid the now-full bottle of memories back into his robe. 

“Are you sure he wouldn’t find that more frightening?”

She chuckled in return and patted his shoulder. “I’m sure you look properly ridiculous in a swimsuit, dear.”

He paused at the fireplace, glanced toward Dumbledore’s portrait, now napping with enthusiasm (and definitely not  _ twinkling _ at him when he isn’t looking directly at it).

“Do you mind if I..?” he ventured, nodding toward the grounds.

Minerva sighed, as if she’d expected this.

“Go on then. Let me Disillusion you first--”

“I can do it myself,” he snapped, wrapping himself in the effects of the spell. He would have been offended that she wanted to hide his presence on campus if he did not desperately want to hide himself. 

He almost stopped by the dungeons, but he’d said goodbye to his office there when he’d assumed leadership of the school. 

What he hadn’t had a chance to see was the tomb. He’d fled after the confrontation at the Astronomy Tower, and when he came back to take the old man’s position, the tomb had already been cracked open and plundered. He visited only to remove the flowers students (and he imagined some staff) snuck out there at night, flowers that he would have to make a show of publicly burning, thinking on the surface  _ what a waste of time and magic, for a man who doesn’t deserve it;  _ thinking deeper,  _ what a waste for a man who didn’t deserve what happened to him. _

But someone must have actually gone as far as fixing it at some point, as now it stood before him, gleaming white. A childish part of him hoped that this too was part of his plan, that he’d figured out a way to survive a Killing Curse same as the boy and was biding his time before resuming his rightful place at Hogwarts. Something to do with the portrait, which was entirely too much like the real Dumbledore than even a magical portrait had a right to be. 

He almost thought he could hear the scratching at the walls of the tomb, but a feverish part of him knew he was thinking of Potter’s tale, of the cave, of Bagshot. Of the dream-Dumbledore, reaching for him with curse-blackened fingers.

If there was anything moving in that tomb, he wanted no part of it.

And if there was a sweep of borage, blooming with white star-shaped flowers around the base of the tomb when he left, well. No one would know he’d been there.

He swept back into the castle--or tried. His body betrayed him before he was halfway back to the gate, his limbs leaden and his breath wheezing tight through his throat. 

He clenched his jaw and did it anyway.

“Alright?” Minerva asked. 

He nodded to her, almost a bow. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

She rolled her eyes and wrapped him in another hug.

“Before you go,” she said, stepping back but keeping one hand dug firmly into his shoulder, “I heard a funny thing. St. Mungo’s has announced the Remus Lupin Relief Program. They’re pledging Wolfsbane Potion on a sliding scale, sponsored by none other than Harry Potter. I wonder where he might be planning on acquiring such a quantity of a very difficult brew, every day, for a week, every month. I imagine even someone with access to the hospital’s lab would struggle.”

Severus flicked his eyes to Dilys Derwent’s empty portrait, then to Dumbledore’s. Still napping. “Did he put you up to this? This hovering you’re doing?”

She narrowed her eyes. “No one put me up to  _ anything _ , Severus. For Merlin’s sake, you don’t  _ have _ to do this.”

He yanked his shoulder away. “Not all of our missing students went into hiding, Minerva. And in case you’ve forgotten, I have my own history with untreated werewolves. Do you blame me for wanting to spare other children the trauma? After so many near-misses even here?”

For a moment he thought she was going to protest further, but she sagged and folded her arms across her chest instead.

“Fine. Do what pleases you. Just do me the favor of at least  _ trying _ to take care of yourself. Don’t make me check up on you. Peesey will be upset.”

His lip curled. What he would have given as a student, even as Headmaster, to hear this concern. It rang hollow now. Perhaps he would have been better off had Lupin savaged him. The werewolf had certainly been given more of a benefit of the doubt.

He disappeared back into the fireplace.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you bake something and you don't feed it to someone, did you ever really bake at all?
> 
> jfk snape how many people gotta tell you to slow your roll before you listen


	6. Chapter Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry wondered how long he could stand at the end of Spinner’s Lane before Snape came out to get him. He’d Apparated in at the appropriate time; he had the stupid marble. And yet he stood, frozen, staring at the little rowhouse that was much too small to be properly haunted but felt like it was all the same.

Harry wondered how long he could stand at the end of Spinner’s Lane before Snape came out to get him. Just like last week and the week before that, he’d Apparated in at the appropriate time; he had the stupid marble. Those meetings hadn’t been nearly as fraught as that first one.

And yet he stood, frozen, staring at the little rowhouse that was much too small to be properly haunted but felt like it was all the same.

_ You pulled the Sword of Gryffindor out of the stupid hat,  _ he told himself.  _ You can do this _ .  _ At least to make sure he’s still alive in there _ . 

He almost turned right around when the door creaked open on its own at his approach. And he still stopped dead when got inside and saw Snape.

“Oh what’s the matter now, Potter?” he groused. “Do you begrudge an invalid an elastic waistband?”

Snape was wearing  _ sweatpants. _ He was sitting in that armchair, a book draped over his thigh, and he was wearing sweatpants and a ratty football t-shirt. He still looked like death warmed over, but...

“Sit, boy,” he finally snapped, and Harry hustled over to the sofa.

Snape hadn’t just gotten more comfortable in his dress, Harry now realized. The house in general felt more… cozy. Not actually cozy, but something closer to it--the parlor was still dominated by surprisingly menacing books, but the window to the street was now framed by deep green curtains, just slightly too long so that they puddled on the floor. A thick Persian rug, faded to a soft brown, muffled his footsteps. It smelled like apricots and cinnamon rather than dust and mouldering old paper, and the source was a neat stack of scones on the small table.

He’d been serious about the baking, Harry thought in a daze. He wanted to pinch himself.

“Well?” Snape ground out in a rasp.

Harry blinked. “Well what?”

Snape rolled his eyes. “The potion? We tweaked it last week?”

“Oh! Oh.” He’d thought about this in advance, he really had… It was just so bloody awkward  _ talking _ about it. “Well. I feel better?”

Snape sneered and opened his mouth, and Harry hurried on.

“I mean. Before, it felt like… like there was a weight, pressing down on me. All the time. Like a boulder on my chest. But every week it gets lighter. It’s… easier just to do things without the weight.”

“I suppose that’s progress. And the suicidal urges?”

God, when would he be able to hear that word without wincing?

“I still think about it,” he admitted softly. “It’s like now that I’ve had the idea, I can’t get rid of it. ‘Why are you looking at flats, you’re just going to die anyway,’ ‘Why would you even need another owl when you’re just going to--’”

He squeezed his eyes shut, thinking of a white shape at the bottom of a heavy cage. He took a deep breath.

“But I still haven’t wanted to actually try anything. If that’s what you mean.”

“Near enough,” Snape said easily, tapping a finger against his bone-white teacup. “I’ve been doing research, Potter. What I’d like you to do, the next time you have a thought like that, is to stop and ground yourself. Take a deep breath, pay attention to what your body is doing without judgement. List out the twelve uses for dragon blood, or--I don’t know, the members of your favorite quidditch team, whatever the fuck a seventeen year old boy is interested in. Interrupt the line of thinking, consider if there is anything that might be provoking the thought. Anxiety about the future, say, if looking at flats is a triggering event. You mustn’t be afraid of… encumbrances. Things that will keep you tethered to your life.”

Harry found himself nodding, like it was perfectly normal to be getting… therapy, or whatever, from the man who had hated him since he had first laid eyes on him. He wondered, not for the first time, if he really had died in the forest and he was hallucinating while his brain caught up to the rest of him. Or did the Killing Curse just… work all at once? 

_ Smack! _

“Jesus!” Harry clutched his chest. Snape had slammed his wand flat down onto the table. The pile of scones wobbled.

“I can  _ hear  _ you brooding, Potter. Stop it.”

Harry folded his arms across his chest.

“I wasn’t--”

“You were,” Snape insisted. “Ruminating is counter-productive. Your mind is not fixed. The Harry Potter you are today is not the Harry Potter you were yesterday, a month ago, a year ago. If you water those thoughts with your attention they shall grow and flourish.”

Harry spared himself having to respond to that ( _ it wasn’t that simple _ , he insisted to himself) by stuffing his mouth with a scone.

They… they really were good. Damn. Why did this keep surprising him?

Snape sighed.

“What about your plans? Were you still deciding whether to go back to Hogwarts?”

“I told Kingsley yes. I can’t--I can’t see myself going back there after everything. Ron ‘n me are going to be tagging along with a senior Auror on smaller calls until they get a training class together.”

“And have you told anyone else?”

He took a deep breath. “Ron knows. Hermione knows. I haven’t told anyone else though I guess Ron probably mentioned it to his family. And McGonagall, too, I guess, I had to RSVP ‘no’.”

“And the young Miss Weasley? What did she say when you told her she’d face another year at Hogwarts without her beau?”

“Um.”

Snape put his cup down rather less gently than usual. “...You didn’t tell her.”

Harry shrugged helplessly.

Snape narrows his eyes. “Was this a misguided attempt to spare her emotions, Potter? Or yours? Because I assure you, I may have been out of the classroom last year but I can clock a heartsick teenager from a mile away.”

“Don’t see how it’s any of your business,” Harry muttered. But he looked up. “She really missed me, though?”

“You idiot,” Snape replied. It was clear his heart wasn’t in it. “Take the bloody scones and get out. Potions’re in the icebox. Bring the plate back next week and tell me what you did to make it up to her.”

Harry patted down his hair for the thousandth time.

“Maybe if you shaved it?” the mirror offered. “You have a lovely skull, dear, I’m sure you’d look fine. Especially if you got out of that muggle nonsense.”

He blinked. He wasn’t sure how he felt about the mirror evaluating his skull. (That was a lie--he knew how he felt and it was wildly uncomfortable.)

“It’s not nonsense,” he replied. “It’s a three-piece suit and I was told it looks very dashing.”

“Oh alright,” it replied primly. “I’m sure you know best.”

He really, really didn’t. But it was too late to change his mind now--he’d told Ginny he was taking her to a fancy muggle restaurant (under the logic that they’d be less likely to be bothered) and she’d gotten a fancy muggle dress and he’d made reservations and...

He sighed. His hair was a lost cause. Best not be late.

When he stepped out the fireplace, he was greeted by an empty kitchen. He thought it may have been just vacated, however--a mug of tea still steamed on the counter. He didn’t have time to wonder, though, as Ginny stepped in from the living room.

“Wow.”

Ginny twitched at the skirt of her dress. “Does it look right? Hermione took me to the shop for it.”

He’d have to remember to thank Hermione later--the navy satin dress had a halter top, leaving her Quidditch-toned shoulders bare. A few whisps of copper hair had escaped her low bun, just grazing collarbones dusted with freckles. It lightly skimmed her--

Ginny cleared her throat and Harry thought he heard a muffled laugh from upstairs.

“It looks right! I mean, it looks--you look great.” Harry, blushing, held out his arm. “Shall we?”

She smirked, grabbed his arm, and they Disapparated with a pop.

The restaurant wasn’t as packed as he’d feared--a sharply-dressed host escorted them to a small, white-tableclothed table in front of a bay of windows, where a handful of spotlights played over a waterfall. 

“Wish I’d learned French instead of Latin,” Harry muttered, looking down at the menu. Their waiter had introduced a slew of specials but the words blurred by him; Ginny, by contrast, looked serene as she ordered  _ poêle de homard au gingembre, lait de noix de coco au curry et coriandre.  _ She peered over her menu at him and told him to order the duck. 

“Can’t go wrong with duck at a French restaurant,” she smirked.

She was absolutely right--the duck was amazing. It came with candied raisins and something called couscous in a lemony sauce, which he’d never even heard of before. If they weren’t really talking over dinner, he told himself, it was because it was delicious. Not incredibly awkward.

“So. When does the groveling start?” Ginny finally said, crossing her fork and knife across the plate.

“Um.”

“I’m still mad at you,” she went on. “You were on the run for months, literally died. I saw--”

She closed her eyes for a moment.

“I saw Hagrid. Carrying you. And then it’s all over and you tell me you need space again? I thought, now that he’s dead... You’ve hardly been around, Harry. I’ve given you space. What’s this all about?”

He mimicked Ginny with his silverware--he’d been very worried about staining the tablecloth. Definitely that and not this conversation.

“I’m sorry. I know I’ve been a prat. And… I know this year hasn’t been easy for you either. Snape said--”

“Thats the other thing,” she broke in. “What’s up with that? You  _ hate _ each other. He’s  _ horrible _ .”

Harry fussed with his vest. “I dunno, he’s not so bad. He’s funny sometimes.”

He took a deep breath.

“That’s actually what, uh. What I wanted to talk to you about…”

Somehow it was easier, once he got started. Just like it’d been with the wand. He didn’t think he was ready to talk about the Tower but he told her what he’d been thinking, that night. About how tired he’d been, of all of it. How empty the days ahead had looked, without this grand fate his life had revolved around for seven years. And how afraid he’d been of messing things up. 

The waiter bussed the table and brought out a dessert menu as Ginny digested what he’d said. Her eyes sparkled when she finally looked up.

“I didn’t know.”

He resisted the urge to pat her on the shoulder, to deflect, to lie and say that it was fine now. 

“Helps that I didn’t tell you,” he finally said. “Snape sniffed it out on me, I guess. He’s been… helping.”

“I still should’ve known. But… it’s strange to think of him like that. Helping,” she admitted. “With Dumbledore, and just.. Him. Though looking back, he had Hagrid administer a lot of detentions that should’ve gone to the Carrows. I guess we weren’t getting one over on him as much as I thought…”

He reached out to grasp her hands.

“You were bloody brilliant, Ginny.”

“Well, you were running around fighting Death Eaters and destroying Horcruxes. I painted some walls with Neville and Luna.”

“What about the Carrows? They were monsters and they had you all trapped in the castle with them.”

Ginny frowned. “Do we have to talk about this? Tell me about this thing with Lupin.”

“That was actually Snape’s idea. Stop, I know, it’s mad, right?”

“It must be expensive,” she said slowly.

“Well… yeah,” he admitted. “But that’s half the problem, how expensive it is to make. I don’t usually think about my parents’ vault… or Sirius’s, even, now that he’s been exonerated and. You know. It feels almost like I’m giving away a part of them when I spend it.”

“They gave it to  _ you _ , Harry, it isn’t like it’s them. But if you want to think of it like that… aren’t you letting them continue to help, to do good? I mean you should talk to Hermione, not  _ Snape _ , I’m sure she’s got a million ideas…”

Harry laughed. “What, mass producing socks to free all the house elves?”

She snorted and waved him off. “Oh stop it, she gave up on that. I’m just saying you’ve been awfully involved with him, for like a month. More. It’s strange.”

“I’m not sure,” he said slowly. “I think he’s trying to make amends.”

Ginny scoffed. “Little late for that, isn’t it?”

Harry was still thinking about it at their next meeting.

Snape asked him the usual questions: how are you? How’re the potions? How’re the self-destructive impulses? Harry told him about dinner, about agreeing to try again with Ginny. She’d finish her seventh year and they’d visit on Hogsmeade weekends. (”Not like that!” Harry’d cried, blushing beet red, when Snape had asked archly if he was planning on inviting her back to his flat.)

Snape had even smirked a little when he mentioned it was a French restaurant and pulled out a tray of fresh croissants, which made Harry seriously consider whether or not the marble was bugged. 

He’d also brought the plate back, which seemed to be a surprise.

Harry almost thought Snape was back to something like normal. Yes, he still moved with that brittle hesitance he’d had ever since the bite, and still looked somehow shrunken in on himself. But he had on a proper pair of trousers this time, with a high-collared white shirt. Though it covered most of his neck, the bandage was gone, and he’d made croissants, for Merlin’s sake, and the house looked almost like a person lived there--there was a newspaper on the table, bananas ripening on the counter. Even a pair of shoes left out by the back door. He was better.

So Harry finally asked the question.

“Why are you doing this? I mean. All these meetings. The Fiendfyre. Why are you being so  _ nice _ ? Why now? You were never doing any of it for my sake before.”

Snape’s face twitched, and the tiny smile he’d worn dropped like a stone. They were back to how things were back in early May--back was the wax doll, tight-lipped and still.

“You are not incorrect,” he finally said. “I realize I have been unfair in my treatment of you.”

The moment stretched. He clutched his teacup with fingertips gone white with tension.

“It was much easier to be angry,” he finally continued, voice flat. “To bury myself in spite and call it righteous anger. Not just when you arrived at Hogwarts.”

He still did not look at Harry as he set the cup down and jerked to his feet to pace the room in a tight circle. Despite that, his voice was as placid as if he were delivering a lecture on powdered holly.

“I set myself down a path when I was very young. I could blame any number of people, of circumstances, but it was my choice, and my failures.”

He halted in front of one of the glassed shelves and Harry realized the curtains, at some point, had started fluttering in a wind that did not exist, not even with Snape’s passage.

“I saw what I wanted to see. What I allowed myself to see, what I could live with and still face the Dark Lord. I could not--I would not allow myself to sympathize. It was a mistake. One that I realize may have contributed to your... current issue.”

Snape turned his head to the side, still not looking. Harry thought he might go on, wanted him to. Hadn’t he always wanted an apology? From someone, anyone, for how he’d been treated? So why did he feel guilty?

“Harry. Why are  _ you _ here? You keep showing up. You have options--surely I am not suitable… your parents  _ died _ because of me. I have burned the wand for you.  _ Why are you here? _ ”

Harry blinked. He’d never even considered quitting.

“It wasn’t… just you,” Harry stuttered. He didn’t--he didn’t  _ know _ how to answer. This was the thing he thought they’d agreed not to talk about, not to think about. He’d expected Snape to get  _ angry _ , and maybe he was, but this? This was guilt, and despair, and maybe Snape wasn’t actually okay. “Voldemort, he-- _ he _ picked my parents. Peter Pettigrew betrayed them.”

“Fine,” he spat, finally turning to face Harry. The curtains rippled and yet Snape still held himself still, sunken eyes burning in a leaden face. “I will share the blame.  _ Why me?  _ You could find someone at St. Mungo’s. Could find a Muggle therapist, a Squib. At any point you could have asked for a discreet referral.  _ Any  _ of the other professors, any of your friends’ parents. Your friends themselves. You have always,  _ always _ had other options.”

Harry took a breath and forced it all out at once.

“If I blamed you for what happened to them, I’d be a bloody hypocrite, wouldn’t I? If--if it’s your fault,” he continued resolutely, “then it’s just as much my fault for getting Sirius killed. I know how you feel about him, but…”

He trailed off, then looked up at Snape. “If I hadn’t gone charging off half-cocked, without thinking, he might still be alive. Just like if…”

“The impetuousness of youth,” Snape replied hoarsely, collapsing back into the armchair. The curtains settled. “Eager to prove one’s self, to be of value. Unwilling to admit you could be in over your head.”

Huh. That explained a lot, actually.

“The other thing,” Harry began, thinking of Luna and trying to give Snape the gift of being helpful, to steer the conversation to less emotionally fraught subjects. “I realized--you know there’s not many people left who remember my parents? My mum. As a person, not as some brilliant student or, or, tool to defeat Voldemort. Just as a person.”

Snape snorted. “Rather high mortality rate, the class of ‘78. You realize, though, we were not anything approaching friends at the end.”

Harry shrugged. Both of those things were true.

“Did Petunia ever take you to visit where she grew up? Where your mother grew up?”

Harry shook his head. “She never told me much about anything. My grandparents were already dead, though I guess you would’ve known that.”

“Saw the obituaries. Well. Did you want to see it? We’ll have to make it quick--I’ll need to get back to St. Mungo’s soon enough. Still two more nights till the full moon.”

“I’d… like that a lot, actually.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please blame La Grenouille in Manhattan for my French--I stole from their menu. I am also pretty sure couscous was still in the realm of “weird and obscure” in the late 90’s.
> 
> I'm sort of glossing over the worst of Snape's asshole tendencies as a teacher in this fic. Suffice it to say that it's Not Okay in real life. I might write more explicitly about this in the next chapter, depending on how it goes. (Oh the dangers of not keeping a buffer...)


	7. Chapter Six

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, uh. I soooooort of, um, rewrote huge swaths of the early chapters, and split off part of the first one into a prologue of sorts. There may be an epilogue. There's definitely going to be more than seven actual chapters. Chapter Five isn't too much different than how it was before, so I don't think it would be too confusing to just leap right in to Ch.6 without rereading. 
> 
> Hopefully I didn't just make it worse, hahaha *sweats*

It should have been a ten minute walk to the Evans’s house. Would have been, if Severus was moving at his usual brisk clip, but four nights of brewing Wolfsbane in bulk, on top of all of the other indignities he had asked of his body and his magic, had sapped him.

So it was closer to fifteen to twenty minutes that the two of them spent working their way from the wrong side of the river bisecting Cokeworth to the right. Lily’s father, he told Harry, had been a foreman at the textile mill that employed his own father. Mr. Evans had been one of the few to see through Tobias’s surface charm and wasn’t especially happy to see his sallow, beaky son nosing around his youngest daughter.

“Lily always had a penchant for strays,” Snape murmured, finally stopping in front of the neat stone cottage. “Well. Here we are.”

The boy spared him a frowning glance, then turned back to the house with a longing expression.

“It looks like their cottage in Godric’s Hollow. D’you know who lives here now?”

“No idea. Petunia wasted no time in selling the place when she inherited,” Snape replied. “I never saw the point in visiting and I barely saw the inside of  _ this _ house. We spent most of our time in the back garden or the park.”

“We came here once. When I was eleven and they were trying to avoid the Hogwarts letters? We stayed at the Railview. Aunt Petunia never even mentioned this was where she grew up.”

“Surprised Tuney let Vernon talk her into that.”

Harry shook his head. 

“Uncle Vernon didn’t bother asking her opinion about much of anything.”

Snape let out a long sigh. “Lily never would’ve stood for that. Fortune or no fortune--she always said she’d be a working woman. That she’d--” he snapped his jaw shut and finished silently,  _ that she’d die before she’d live like her mum. Trapped all day in the house. _

“Stay if you want,” he said, turning on his heel. “I’m going back.”

“Wait, what? Headmaster--”

He set his jaw and stormed on, all the way back to his dead end home. He told himself it didn’t matter if the boy followed or not--though he did. Despite the fact that clearly, Severus would not be providing any further morsels of information. And yet he still trailed along behind him, never too far lest Snape wobble and fall over like a feeble old man. 

It wasn’t until Snape promised he’d rest before heading out to St. Mungo’s--lest he splinch himself across five different counties--that Harry agreed to leave, and come back in two weeks.

_ He’s always bleeding in his dreams now.  _

_ He teaches a class and has forgotten the lesson plan, and blood seeps down the front of his robe. He loses control of the classroom in a way that he hasn’t since his first years of teaching. He sits in the staff room with Flitwick, McGonagall, and Sprout, and he is soaked again, fat drops ticking to the floor. They are all staring at him. A werewolf, sometimes Remus and sometimes Greyback and sometimes his whole pack, chases him through the forest, and he knows they are tracking him by the iron-dark smell but he cannot stop or else they will overtake him and tear him to pieces. _

_ Even the dreams that are more like memories are tainted. His father follows the trail of blood and pulls him out from under the bed, because he’s been bad and needs to take his licks. He calls Lily a mudblood and sleeps at the Fat Lady’s side and bleeds and bleeds and bleeds until the floor is a mosaic of sticky red footprints. He shudders under Voldemort’s monstrous, beatific smile as he presses the Dark Mark into his arm and then touches just a finger to the wound, just for a taste.  _

_ Some of them are not even his memories, not really.  _

_He saw more than he wanted to of Harry Potter’s mind during their disastrous Occlumency lessons. He hadn’t been lying when he’d told the boy he saw what he wanted to see, what he allowed himself to see. He had pulled the secondhand memories out and left them in the Pensieve and there they had stayed for three years because he_ could not look _at the boy and_ know _. Except now it all mingles together at night, and he is forced to scrub the kitchen floor in Little Whinging over and over again--he bleeds faster than he can clean. Tuney is screeching at him to stop, just stop, and has both hands wrapped around his neck but bright arterial blood spurts out, slips through his fingers as his body is wrenched by sobs because he is_ bad, bad, bad _._

He woke the morning of the full moon thinking,  _ I am so tired I could cry _ . He gave himself permission to stare up at the ceiling for a while, to see if the feeling would pass. He tried to remember how long ago it had last been painted--he’d aired out the place, absolutely gutted the master bedroom when he’d shipped his father off to the nursing home when the cirrhosis got to be too much him to live on his own, but the ceiling was still stained yellow by old nicotine and smoke. A while then. 

He got up anyway after ten minutes, eyes burning.

He tried to be generous with himself, without falling to indulgence. He showered, and only stood dumbly under the hot water for fifteen minutes. He dressed in appropriate muggle clothes: black slacks with a white, banded collar shirt, with the buttons done all the way up. Sleeves rolled in deference to the heat--he’d let them down when he put the robe on later. Socks, no shoes in the house--he wasn’t a monster. 

He kept himself busy into the afternoon. He took inventory of both his groceries and his potion ingredient stores. He cleared the backlog of dishes, wiped down the tables and counters, swept the floors. He did his best to sink into the various complaints of his body to better ignore the complaints of his mind.

Finally, it was late enough in the day that he couldn’t put off the trip to London any longer without running the risk of starting the Wolfsbane too late. He had errands to run.

Brewing at St. Mungo’s was sheer pleasure. The warm wooden ingredient cabinets, protected by glass, contrasted beautifully with the ancient grey limestone cladding the walls. He worked on a white granite table, brewing in polished silver cauldrons. Bright white whisps hovered steadily at the ceiling, where a magical breeze wafted any fumes into vents. It was insulated from the floors above by both magic and distance, at least a full floor’s worth of topsoil and sand and gravel. If he was not stirring, it was dead silent.

Mediwitch Petra Nesmith’s foot tapping was, therefore, particularly intrusive.

He grimaced and focused on the seven cauldrons. They’d had 21 takers for this first month; it wouldn’t be impossible to brew them all in one large cauldron but when working with multiple doses, batches of three seemed to result in the most stable brew. It was a huge boon arithmetically to have ended up with seven cauldrons of three doses.

“Are you sure you’re good to finish, Severus?” Nesmith finally said. “If you need a break I’m sure Thome could slip in and--”

“I am  _ sure _ you will find my work sufficient, Healer Nesmith,” he said coldly, not breaking his attention. “As you know, we’re nearly done.”

“That’s not what I--oh, nevermind,” she huffed. 

Finally, the smoke turned the correct shade of celestial blue. He switched out the stirring rod for his wand and to each in turn, cast the spell to finish it off:  _ lykorpus homino _ . It must be spoken in a whisper as one drew the wand down in a striking motion, only to pull back at the last second and just gently tap the surface of the liquid. Each shivered at the contact and then went utterly still.

He set his wand down on the table and that was Nesmith’s cue to approach so that they could begin decanting.

It was purely an effort of will that kept him upright as they finished the last cauldron of Wolfsbane. He leaned back into the cold edge of the table and mirrored the witch’s earlier pose--no need to broadcast his shaking hands.

“Nicely done,” Nesmith said. She tapped each glass and murmured  _ operio;  _ something like iridescent plastic wrap flowed out and lidded each one. “You know, they’ve been asking for you. On the ward. There isn’t a werewolf in England who doesn’t know how difficult this is.”

“They want to complain about the flavor, no doubt.”

“It can’t be worse than what their mouths taste like after the full moon without it.”

He shot her a sour look.

“I’m sure they’d think differently if they knew who exactly their saviour was.”

“Or,” she countered calmly, “they would be grateful to know that a hero of the war and one of the best potioneers of his age is brewing the thing keeping the wolf at bay.”

He would not dignify that with a response.

She rolled her eyes and amended, “Anti-hero, does that make you happy? No one has forgotten what happened lat year but--”

“They would be fools if they had, Petra.”

“Not everyone hates you,” she insisted. “Some people do and always will, but if you asked any Healer in this hospital under the age of 40--”

She broke off, seeing his deepening scowl, and tried again.

“Do you know we have one of the lowest rates of accidental poisonings? Commonwealth countries, the Continent, the Americas. It’s been steadily declining since the early eighties. The Mediwitches on that ward started joking about poisoning  _ you _ . Fewer patients, less funding. They all joked about how ecstatic they were when Slughorn came back.”

She paused and glanced around the empty room.

“I say that in confidence, of course. Black humor. Of course we give each patient our utmost care and then you were bit--”

He snorted. “I do understand how humor works.”

“You never know. Just… help me with one of the trays, pop in, say hello. I won’t keep you.”

Petra won out in the end. She likely figured it had been a foregone conclusion--she had been one of his, after all, a Slytherin, class of 1985. A second year when he’d started teaching, too young to have known him as a student, old enough at thirty to treat him more like a peer.

It certainly stood in contrast to how he’d been treated in Diagon Alley. He’d felt eyes crawling all over him almost as soon as he’d popped through the wall behind the Leaky Cauldron. The goblins at Gringott’s had treated him same as always--they disdained most wizards, and were neutral in the war. But part of his trip had been returning a mail-order of potion ingredients to the apothecary. Counterfeit unicorn horn; molded shrivelfig. Clearly an insult as he was a long-time customer. The manager had been apologetic but he didn't need to be a mind-reader to know he was full of shit.

At least when he’d been under Voldemort’s thumb, everyone had been too afraid to stiff him.

The werewolf containment ward was kept on a lower level, like the potions lab, so the walk was not too strenuous, and the only people they passed were orderlies too busy to waste time staring. 

It was less of a ward, in all actuality; more of a dungeon, just with the dry and sterile lighting of the hospital. There was a nurse’s station at the entrance, then a barred door leading to a hallway of stone-walled cells. Each was outfitted with a waiting room chair, a plush dog bed, a water bowl, and a soft toy or rawhide. Insulting to a human but comforting in the skin of the wolf. The hope was that they would be able to sleep most of the night away.

Snape hung back and watched as Petra and a junior healer handed out goblets. The werewolves had turned the ward almost into a social hall--though they were all varying degrees of scruffy, as Lupin had been, they all seemed to be happy, grateful even, to be there. Happy to compare notes, to be in company where their deepest, darkest secret required no confession.

There was even talk of redecorating the cells--they’d been built with uncontrolled werewolves in mind, but surely, said one of them, a grizzled older fellow, they could afford some creature comforts. (Severus sighed.)

Too many of them were children. One little girl accompanied only by her mother looked like she couldn’t have been more than a few months out from her attack. He hoped one day she’d barely remember the terror of a full moon, unmedicated and wild. Would they let her mother stay with her? He hadn’t thought to ask about this part of it; Petra had been enthusiastic enough about the project.

He remembered all those nights spent brewing for Lupin, and then the quiet nights after the man had gone undercover. Relieved of his burden so that a man he hated could try to throw his life away for the greater good, and why did that sound so damn familiar?

The two healers finished their round and Petra caught Severus’s eye, then tapped her wand against the tray. 

Oh no.

“Hullo everyone! A quick word--I know, I know, we had dress rehearsals yesterday, you all know what you’re doing. But if you haven’t finished your potion yet, first off why haven’t you finished your potion yet?-- and second, please raise your glass to the man who has been making it for the past week, Severus Snape.”

The surprising thing was, they did. Hesitantly at first, glancing around the room as if to ask  _ is this okay _ ? But they did it. Every last one of them. A mixture of claps and the ringing of wands tapping against glasses. 

He tried to back away and out but only found himself bumping against the wall. He was already backed into the corner. For long, precious moments he could not figure out what he was supposed to be doing with his face. What was the shape of gratitude, of gracious acceptance of praise? Was that what was happening, or was this a mockery? He thought this was perhaps another nightmare, one vivid enough that his back was even cold where it touched stone, and at any moment James Potter would pop out of nowhere to hoist him up by the ankle and his neck would start bleeding like a pig to be slaughtered but no.

No. He has only done a good and difficult thing and these people are grateful.

He thought someone was maybe asking for a toast but all he really heard was the sound of blood rushing in his ears. He tipped his head and made his mouth spit out some kind of noise that seemed to satisfy the werewolves, if not Petra, and he fled.

He told himself later that it was this anomaly--being  _ thanked _ , with no uncomfortable baggage--that distracted him so catastrophically.

His normal habit was to walk a short distance, then Apparate back home. Perhaps in smaller hops, if he was especially tired, though he wasn’t sure when he  _ wasn’t _ especially tired anymore. But this particular evening, he walked for longer, farther into Muggle London, certainly out of earshot of the hospital.

At first he thought he was being mugged. After all, he had a huge wad of muggle cash; this was the worst and thus most natural time for it to happen.

Perhaps he’d been sloppy. Certainly moving between the same two places at roughly the same time for a week straight was a risk, no matter how worthy the cause. Moody--if Moody hadn’t been blasted in the face with a Killing Curse, which was at least a better death than plummeting from his broom, when they were moving Potter from Tuney’s house--would have been apoplectic.

He had only himself to blame for being held at wandpoint by a wild-eyed Rabastan Lestrange, looking as twitchy and wrecked as ever.

“What do you want Rab?” he said evenly. They were in a quiet commercial district, older, no tourists. No cameras and no residents to hear, so at least there was little chance of collateral damage. Also not much of a chance of being discovered.

“Who says I want anything?”

His smile was a broken thing, too sharp and too stretched. He pitched closer, close enough for Severus to pick up the raw smell of nervous sweat. He consciously did not flinch as his former peer slid a dirty, knobby hand into his robe to draw his hawthorn wand from its accustomed place. Rab had known him for many years, after all, even accounting for all that time spent in the madness of Azkaban; he knew his habits and many of his secrets. He couldn’t stop the shudder this time.

“If you didn’t want something you would’ve already killed me.”

“That’s true,” he said with a brittle laugh, tucking the wand into his own robe, “you were always too smart for your own good.”

He grabbed Severus’s arm, almost pulling him off balance, and yanked up the sleeve, revealing the faint scar tissue that was all that was left of the Dark Mark. (There used to be another scar there but it had been slathered with a field’s worth of dittany.)

“He’s really gone then,” he whispered. Rab rolled his forearm forward and spared a quick glance--too quick, not enough of a window--down. His scar was swollen with infection: at some point he had etched the Mark back into his own flesh and left it to fester. “They’re all gone. Bella--that bloodtraitor bitch, she--and Rod, I thought he was behind me--”

He swallowed a sob and it was a testament to the man’s nerves that the wand still did not waver an inch. It was so easy to underestimate him in comparison to Bella and Rod.

“Rabastan. What do you want?” 

Keep him talking. Keep him distracted. Rabastan was being very careful not to catch his eye, god damn him.

“A question for a question. Why did you do it?”

“Do what?”

Rab snarled out a  _ crucio _ and Severus crumpled to his knees with a resounding crack. Every nerve ending in his body shrieked and howled in stinging, burning agony. His skin was peeling away starting from his throat, he was swallowing glass, his very bones were glass and shattering under the curse--and then the Cruciatus released him. He still felt like he was suffocating, his throat ached, he thought he may have cracked his kneecaps--but it was all the normal, physical pain of an injured body pushed to capacity.

He pressed his forehead to the hot cement and used the hitching of his breath to slide a hand, just for a moment, into his trouser pocket.

“Fucking turncoat, you  _ know _ ! He gave you a place of honor, halfblood! He gave you Hogwarts! I  _ defended _ you!”

“You wouldn’t understand,” Severus wheezed.

“Bella was right,” Rab spat, sorrow swallowed up by rage in an instant, “only had to look at the way you followed around that little mudblood  _ slut _ .” He rolled his eyes. “Merlin, it’s been yea--”

Severus whipped his hand in a slashing arc and a line of blood bloomed open across the Death Eater’s hand. His fingers twitched open and Severus lunged, summoning the wand to close the gap, and immediately wrapped Rabastan in thick coils of rope. He summoned his own wand back and pulled himself upright again with a cry, legs shaking. God, his fucking knees.

“Funny, from you,” he gasped out. “Bellatrix--had the only brain and set of balls between you three.” He cast a Silencing Charm and went on, “You can’t be blamed for cocking this up so badly.”

He fends off little jolts and shudders, aftershocks from the Cruciatus Curse. He aches, but he laughs at Rabastan’s sheer frustration. It hadn’t sunk in on the man yet how terribly fucked he was, Snape saw, digging into the Death Eater’s mind now that he’s immobile, but there were no other surprises. Rabastan had spent a lifetime as a follower and, not knowing who to trust and so trusting no one, had spent the past two months evading detection, plotting empty revenge, and growing increasingly unhinged. Snagging Potter would have been better but the betrayal stung more. And sometimes any target would do in a pinch.

Severus could relate.

He understood needing a target, any target. That was what he’d joined Voldemort for, after all. What he’d lost in the achingly long years spent controlling himself, controlling his thoughts, debasing himself out of shame and guilt. The freedom to hurt before he could be hurt himself, without consequence.

He could try to make amends. He could tell himself that he was changed, could grind himself into nothing, spend his magic until he was empty trying to make up for what he’d done, but he knew what he was.

He let go of the bone-deep exhaustion that had dogged him since May. He pushed aside the feeling of his head about to unzip from temple to temple, the pulsing headache that sharpened every time he insisted on more magic, more power. His hands did not shake. He dug out the anger that had never really gone away, not in thirty eight years, and he stoked it.

He was someone who enjoyed hurting others. He had tried for mercy, with Sirius Black. And that had backfired spectacularly, innocent or not. So this he was going to enjoy. He couldn’t match the slow torture of Azkaban, or the agony of being hit by layers of the Cruciatus Curse, over and over again into madness, but he could certainly try.

He’d forgotten all about the little marble in his pocket, flashing green. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise I have a good chunk of chapter seven written and I will not leave you dangling from this cliff.


	8. Chapter Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry tried to keep an eye on Snape but his gaze kept skidding away. A year ago he would’ve been downright giddy to catch him in the act of murder--because what else could it be, from the quick glimpse he’d gotten of the figure they’d barely had a face--but now he just felt sick.

“Knut for your thoughts?”

Harry glanced over at Conrad Williamson. He and the long-haired senior Auror were only about halfway through their shift patrolling the streets of London surrounding the hospital; there had been some thinking that the remains of Greyback’s pack would try to pay a visit to the ward earlier in the evening but when that hadn’t happened by full dark, they’d both settled in for a long night.

“It’s slow, isn’t it?”

Conrad laughed. “Oh Harry, I woulda killed to get out on the field my first year, boring or no. You kids are getting the fast-track.”

He glanced over at the older man. He didn’t mind slow so much, though he acknowledged there was a certain level of dread that came with just… waiting for something to happen. And he liked working with Conrad. He reminded him a lot of Bill. 

“Are you okay with that?” he asked, a little afraid of the answer. “I know a lot of Aurors aren’t, not really.”

Conrad sucked his teeth and said, “I don’t blame ‘em. Surprised anyone said it to your face, though.”

“Not to mine,” Harry scowled. 

“Ah. Suppose they forget you kids talk amongst yourselves. Well, nobody wants the next generation to get breaks they didn’t, yeah? And we’re partnered up here to watch each other’s backs. Based on trust.”

“Why do you trust me, then?”

Conrad laughed and clapped Harry on the back. “Who says I trust you? Oh don’t look at me like that. I agree with Kingsley and Gawain, any of you kids show your mettle at the Battle of Hogwarts, that’s good enough for me.”

“And if it isn’t ever good enough for them?”

He shrugged. 

“We’re both relatively young. They’ll retire eventually.”

Harry finally laughed at that--then stopped and cocked his head to the side. He’d thought he was imagining it, especially since the auror hadn’t reacted, but… Was that… was something buzzing? He glanced at Conrad, who was tightening his ponytail, still oblivious. 

Were his jeans… vibrating? _Oh_.

He touched the snake marble, still in his pocket. He wasn’t sure how to explain it to Williamson--he felt oddly protective of it, and it wasn’t something he’d really told anyone else about. He’d thought of it like a leash at first, but it felt more like a safety net now. Or at least an avenue to annoy the bejesus out of Snape, if it struck him.

But now Snape was the one who had triggered it. They hadn’t talked about this. He couldn’t imagine Snape had done it by accident--he didn’t seem to do much of anything by accident unless something was deeply wrong. But how did the damn thing even work?

They turned down another street. The marble, still in his hand, seemed to buzz more insistently. 

“Hey Con?” he ventured. “Do you mind if we… try somewhere else for a bit? I know we have a route and everything but I have a feeling…”

The Auror stopped and frowned at Harry. “A feeling like you need to take a piss, or a _feeling_?”

Harry blushed. “A _feeling_ , I guess.” 

He was ready to come up with some other excuse to sneak off when Conrad surprised him. 

“Alright. Which direction, oh mighty Seer?”

Harry blinked. 

Con gave him a more serious look and went on, “We’re wizards, Harry. Sometimes our guts are right. Don’t need to be a haruspex for that.”

“A what?” he said, spinning like a weather vane to get his bearings. The word was only vaguely familiar.

“Someone who practices divination through the reading of entrails. Usually animals.”

“Usually? I can see why Hogwarts wasn’t big on teaching it, at least before the Carrows.”

“Maybe it was further down the agenda than practicing Unforgiveables on muggleborns.”

Harry nodded absently. He’d met a lot of black-humored aurors since starting training. 

He thought he’d figured out the trick to the marble--it was sort of like playing hot-hot-cold, except it wasn’t just the marble’s flashing or vibrating. There was a deeper presence that felt sharper when he concentrated on it. Snape was somewhere in London, somewhere nearby even.

Conrad had his wand out before Harry even processed the smell of blood a few blocks later.

He motioned Harry to stay back and advanced down the alley that the marble was very insistent was the correct one. Harry did not stay back--he was right behind Conrad, so they both saw the tableau more or less simultaneously.

He picked out Snape right away--he was slumped against the side of a building, head down. He was alive, the marble insisted, and then Harry saw his chest hitch in a deep breath. He could see his hands--swollen and dark, scathingly red in the light of their wands--clenched in his lap, but nothing else.

He was not the source of the blood. That was the other person--he couldn’t figure out if it was man or a woman or even human, there just wasn’t enough bare face left to see, and what he could make out wasn’t… wasn’t shaped right. 

Conrad fired off a Body-Bind and Silencing Charm immediately and Snape barely had time to react before the spells hit. His face froze in a blank expression. The Auror hustled off to the other figure and barked at Harry, “Stay put. Do not talk to him, do not approach him, send for help if he does _anything_ but exist. I’ll send someone or be right back.”

He touched the body--it was clear it wasn’t anything but a body--and Disapparated with a pop.

Harry tried to keep an eye on Snape but his gaze kept skidding away. A year ago he would’ve been downright giddy to catch him in the act of murder--because what else could it be, from the quick glimpse he’d gotten of the figure they’d barely had a _face_ \--but now he just felt sick.

He’d been to Snape’s _house_. Alone. Over and over.

But it seemed he’d been right all along. Right not to trust him even over Dumbledore’s faith. Whatever he’d seen in those memories, it was clear now that Snape hadn’t just been a passive observer to deaths he could not prevent.

Conrad’s Patronus--a small bird, was it a sand piper?--whizzed up.

“Take him to the Head’s office,” came Conrad’s voice. “Use the emergency portkey--don’t go through the Atrium.”

Harry nodded--absurd, you couldn’t see through a Patronus--and the little bird dissolved in a flash.

He touched one single finger to Snape’s shoulder and sent them both to Gawain Robard’s office.

Robards himself had the look of a man pulled from bed, though Harry reckoned it couldn’t have been later than 10:30 at a stretch. His normally sharp, hawkish appearance was softened by the bedhead and the peak of sheepskin slippers under his rumpled robe.

Harry had levitated Snape and dumped him in the office as-is, leaving him face-down in the awkward, humped slouch the spell had locked him into. Robards sighed, bound him with a quiet “ _incarcerous_ ”, and dispelled the Body-Bind. Snape crumpled, then slowly pulled himself into a proper sitting position, still on the floor.

Robards motioned Harry to sit on the other side of the desk as he thumped down himself.

“Not much point in taking the Silencing Charm off until we figure out what the hell is going on,” said Robards lightly. “Legilimency and truth serums are a waste of time on that one.”

“Sir. This is--not what we trained on. Why did Williamson tell me to take him here and not to Azkaban for processing?”

Robards shook his head. “Know the rules before you break the rules, Potter. I want to know who that was first. For all we know Azkaban is exactly where he wants to be, to break out the other Death Eaters.”

Harry supposed that made sense. 

“A question for a question, boy.” 

Harry caught Snape’s full-body twitch from the corner of his eye. 

“How did you know where to go?”

“Er.” Shit. 

He supposed it was now or never. Harry told an abbreviated, maybe a little cleaned up version of the whole sordid thing--about how he felt after the battle, about Snape finding him, trying to help. It seemed innocent at the time, but. Merlin, he’d spent so much _time_ there.

Robards sighs.

“Potter. _Harry_. We’ll talk more about this later, but if you find yourself struggling, please. My door is always open. You won’t be the first Auror and you won’t be the last, unfortunately. Now. What’s this about a marble?”

“We both have them. Twinned,” he said, setting his on the desk.

The auror paled a little and immediately summoned Snape’s, setting the two side by side and muttering a number of spells over them. 

“I didn’t--I didn’t sense anything--” He’s been carrying the thing around with him and had just--had just _trusted_ that it was just what Snape had said it was. 

“Hush. Well, that’s interesting.”

“What, sir?” 

“This is a complicated bit of spellwork but not so unusual for a--” He coughs. “For what it is. Nothing Dark about it. Just the two of them--would’ve been a bit alarming if there were more.”

He was interrupted by one of the Ministry’s flying paper memos. Robards snatched it, scanned it quickly, stared at Snape, and then read the memo again. He pressed his lips together and Harry had the absurd thought that he would need a better poker face if he wanted Robards’s job someday.

He removed the Silencing Spell.

“You knew it was Lestrange.” 

“Yes.” Snape’s voice was hardly more than a whisper.

“You got a message out to Harry for help but managed to subdue him before he and Auror Williamson arrived.”

“Yes.”

“He struck first and you defended yourself. Sadly, Rabastan Lestrange died of injuries sustained during the altercation before he could be brought to justice.” 

Snape hesitated. Then said yes.

The room went still. Then Robards dropped the spell holding Snape. 

“Floo back in the morning for the official statement. I’ll have your account reactivated for transit here and to St. Mungo’s only, for your own security. Those fireplaces are guarded. Please refrain from wandering the streets of London after dark, Severus. No need to tempt fate.”

He paused, then rounded the desk and yanked Snape to his feet. Harry saw him blanch and stagger, but Robards barely noticed, shaking Snape’s hand like he’d just won the lottery. 

“Thank you,” he breathed. “The Longbottoms are ours. Whatever you did--he deserved it.” 

He finally looked down.

“Merlin’s beard, why didn’t you say anything?” He dropped Snape’s swollen hand like it was on fire. “We’ll get you off to St. Mungo’s--”

“No,” Snape broke in, voice cracking. “I’ll be fine. Is there somewhere I can clean up?” 

“Potter?” Robards turned to Harry. “Please escort Mr. Snape to the lounge. By the time you’re done,” he said, turning back to Snape, “I should have the Floo change taken care of. Dagenham in Transportation owes me a favor. I won’t make you go to hospital but I hope you reconsider.”

Harry did as he was told without complaint. _For once,_ a smarmy voice in the back of his head finished, sounding an awful lot like Snape. He didn’t know what to say to the man himself, and so he didn’t say anything at all, just led him silently to the private bathroom, and then watched him limp into the fireplace.

Harry caught Ron’s eye the next morning, before an all-day seminar on stealth. Of course his best friend had rushed in at the last minute, and it wasn’t like they were coming from the same dorm anymore, so Harry had to wait through the three hours of lecturing before the break for lunch.

Noon couldn’t come fast enough. He wanted to get this over with before they went into practicals and he had to wait for another three hours. Last night aside… His Invisibility Cloak was literally an artifact out of myth and legend--he could just wear the cloak.

Ron finally cornered him and they went to a nearby Muggle cafe, not the one that Ministry workers frequented. Harry had gotten used to being able to just eat a ham and swiss without being gawped at.

Harry cast _muffliato_ with a guilty look around. “D’yeh hear about Rabastan Lestrange?” 

“What about him?” Ron said around his pastrami on rye. “Somebody got him last night, yeah? You don’t--blimey, was it you?” 

“Williamson and me, yeah.” 

Ron whistles. 

“We were on patrol last night. And apparently Lestrange attacked Snape, on his way home from St. Mungo’s.” 

“From the werewolf thing?” 

“Yeah.”

“Damn. He alright?” 

“Well. I mean, Lestrange is dead. Snape seemed… I dunno. He killed him.” 

“And?”

Harry shook his head. “You don’t get it--he beat him. Broke his hand doing it. Conrad took him off to hospital before I could get a good look but I wish I didn’t see any of it. His face, he barely looked human. I don’t know what to think about him anymore.”

“He was a monster already, Harry,” Ron frowns. “Why is this freaking you out so much?” 

“He’s not a--I wouldn’t go so far as _monster_ …” 

“He drove Neville’s parents insane!” 

”What? No! I was talking about Snape.” 

“Why would you think any different about Snape? He’s a nasty git who just happens to be nasty to people who deserve it sometimes.” 

“Well, I mean, I guess he is after all. It’s just… I thought maybe he was different? He--he’s actually been helping me with.” 

He stopped. This was not how he imagined this conversation would go. 

Harry took a deep breath and started over. “I was having a really hard time after everything in May. Just… everything. All of it. He… found out. He’s been helping. That’s what I’ve been doing, when I say I’m busy with the werewolf thing. He’s done most of it, to be honest.” 

Ron finally put his sandwich down. “Let me get this straight. You’ve been hanging out with Snape all summer, not _us_ , not even my _sister_. And now you’re upset because you thought he was too mean to Rabastan Lestrange? Known Death Eater, blood purist, bonkers brother-in-law to the person who tortured Hermione in a basement?” 

“I mean, it’s more complicated than that, but.” 

“We’re coming to your flat after work and we’re going to talk about this.” 

Hermione and Ron showed up at six for dinner, true to his word, carrying bags of take-out curry. Harry had been embarrassed the first time he’d had them over--the flat was unambiguously a bachelor pad, with a fridge full of leftovers forcibly provided by Mrs. Weasley and a mishmash of battered thrift store furniture and nothing much in the way of personal effects. Everything he cared about had always had to fit within his trunk, after all.

But this flat was all his, and it was clean, and light streamed in through the windows in the mornings, and that was enough. He thought maybe he’d even get another owl before the start of term, so he could write to Ginny whenever he wanted.

Like lunch with Luna, it was nice to just catch up over food for a while. Hermione was disappointed not to be more involved in “the werewolf thing,” as Ron had taken to calling it. Harry placated her by offering to let her coordinate the expansion, if the early months went well, since after all there’s loads and loads of werewolves who aren’t within easy distance of St. Mungo’s, and wouldn’t it be nice to turn being a werewolf into just… going sort of fuzzy once a month, and having to drink a disgusting potion, and not some horrible life-ruining nightmare? 

She agreed and allowed that she will also need to focus, at some point, on attaining a frightening number of NEWTS.

Finally, Harry pulled the baklava from the fridge.

“Harry, this is amazing,” Hermione sighed. “Where did you get it? I don’t remember the tea shop doing carry-out.”

“I guess we should talk about that,” he said slowly. “Snape sent it home with me.”

Ron sputtered crumbs all over the table and raced for the sink.

“Ronald Weasley!” shrieked Hermione over the faucet, before she and Harry burst into laughter. 

“Merlin’s balls, Ron,” Harry gasped. “D’yeh think I’d poison you?”

“Not you but he might!” he cried, swallowing one last cupped hand’s worth of water.

“If he was poisoning the baked goods I’d be dead and not just loosening my belt.” 

“Yeah, well you’ve been looking a little rounder lately.”

“Ronald!” Hermione swatted him on the arm when he settled next to her on the lumpy paisley couch. “Don’t listen to him Harry, you needed to fill out a little. God, I sound like his mother now. But--Snape? Baked goods? What?”

“Ron told you about Snape and Lestrange, yeah? I haven’t told either of you the whole story.” He pulled one knee up to his chest and folded himself back into the couch. “Right after the battle, I.”

God, he couldn’t do this. He shut his eyes. 

“I sort of tried to jump off the Astronomy Tower.”

He raised his hands, ignored both of their sudden protests. 

“And--it’s fine, no, let me get it out. I mean, I _did_ jump off the tower but obviously it didn’t work, I’d been feeling that way for a little while and hiding it, I didn’t want anyone to worry, I know it was stupid and I… I regretted it immediately. But apparently I’m not the first one to have that idea because it was spelled to drop me off with the headmaster, and that was technically Snape, and maybe it was for the best because apparently he’d done the same thing? I made him swear not to tell anyone and he’s been giving me a potion to help all summer.”

He squeezed his eyes shut and thus flinched when Hermione wrapped him in a hug.

“Oh Harry. We all lived together in a tent for months. How did we miss this? Why didn’t you--”

“I’m the reason we were living in that tent!” He pulled back, scrunching himself up again against the sofa back. “If you weren’t _my_ friends--”

“Stop right there,” Hermione bit out. Harry shut his mouth with a _clack_. “You _don’t_ want to finish that sentence. What did or did not happen to anyone in this war was not your fault, not your responsibility. You don’t get the blame or the credit. I would have lived in that tent with--with a blast-ended skrewt if it meant defeating Voldemort.”

Harry cracked a smile and hoped Hermione wouldn’t punch him for it. “Wouldn’t have even had a tent for very long with one of them.”

“You can talk to us you know,” Ron said, and he was definitely not smiling. “Either of us. And Ginny, too, you know that right? We all--” he took a deep breath, “We all love you. Obviously not all of us the same way, not like my sister and you, I mean, you’re already my brother basically--”

“Ron, you can stop. I get it.”

He stopped.

Then started, “But why _Snape_?”

Harry shrugged. “I was just sort of… in a panic at first. And--I hadn’t really seen him in the infirmary, so that was a lot to take in too. He looked, just a mess. And he was, I don’t even know why, willing to listen to me talk. I figured there’s no way he could think any worse of me.”

“First off,” Hermione said firmly, “Neither of us think any less of you. I need you to understand that. Anyone who does is just… just _wrong_.” She paused, then went on, “But do you really think he’s changed? If he did… what it sounds like he did. And--he did the same thing, you said? You mean he jumped off the tower?”

“That was the least surprising thing, actually. ‘M not saying he was an amazing teacher, or a good person. But he seems like he wants to help. The Wolfbane was his idea, honestly. I think it was just as much for him as it was for me, if not more so. And that potion he’s been giving me--actually I don’t know what he called it. Some variant of a calming draught? I don’t think he ever told me.”

“Can I see?”

Harry pulled one of the bottles out from the breadbox--he’d gotten it from a wizard shop with a preserving charm already on it. She took her time: not just spellwork, but wafting the fumes toward her nose, examining the liquid, even tasting a drop of it.

“It reminds me of… what was it, The Elixir to Induce Euphoria, that you made for Slughorn? It isn’t quite, though.”

“Maybe he’s been using you as a test subject, mate. Feeling batty lately? Urge to dwell in dungeons?”

Harry flinched. “No more batty than I was before.”

“Fuck, I’m sorry Harry. I didn’t think--”

“It’s fine, it was a joke, I get it.” He took a deep breath. “It makes sense that it’s a less intense version of the euphoria elixir, though. Snape compared it to muggle Prozac, if that means anything to you, Hermione.”

She nodded. “It sounds like he _is_ using you as a guinea pig, though. We’d have to check the Department for the Regulation and Registration of Spells and Potions to be sure.”

“Does that make a difference? If it helps him?”

“There could be long-term side effects. We don’t know. Most potions are acute--you take them, they wear off, that’s it. I get the feeling this is meant to be something longer-term.”

“I don’t know if I like the sound of that.”

“We’ll figure it out,” she replied with a confidence Harry wished he had. “When are you supposed to talk to him again? Could you ask him about it? If it’s safe I don’t think you’re the only one it could help. You should check on him regardless.”

“Why’re you so concerned?”

“You’re the one who saved his life in the first place, Ron. Being a git isn’t a capital offense. If he knows what Harry went through via personal experience, I can’t imagine being assaulted by Rabastan Lestrange and then killing him would be great for his stability.

“Which, come to think of it. Maybe you should ask him for the recipe, Harry. Potion master or not. I’m interested in seeing it, especially if you plan on still taking it.”

He remembered how dangerous Snape had made even the cough medicine sound when brewed wrong, and swallowed. “Yeah, alright. I can firecall him at work.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Eight's gonna be a doozy, folks. I'm going to try to get it out within the next week, if not this weekend, but I anticipate it being emotionally difficult to write, so I super appreciate any patience you are willing to give. And if you've stuck around through my highly irregular updates thus far already: thank you! <3
> 
> I have the broad strokes a ninth chapter written and a short epilogue all ready to go, so we're close to the end!


	9. Chapter Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snape staggered through the fireplace and retched. He spat bitter saliva and bile behind him as the walls pulsed in time to his heart, and he wondered how he was going to get upstairs again. He gripped the edge of the shelf behind him and fantasized, briefly, about burning it all down. Bring back the fiendfyre and burn the whole house. Wilkes had gotten a particular thrill, he remembered, from watching it eat its way down an entire terrace full of screaming muggles. He even smelled burning, the memory was so strong, until he looked down and realized his hands were smoking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please be mindful of the tags. We aren't done with some of them.

Snape staggered through the fireplace and retched. He spat bitter saliva and bile behind him as the walls pulsed in time to his heart, and he wondered how he was going to get upstairs again. He gripped the edge of the shelf behind him and fantasized, briefly, about burning it all down. Bring back the Fiendfyre and burn the whole house. Wilkes had gotten a particular thrill, he remembered, from watching it eat its way down an entire terrace full of screaming muggles. He even smelled burning, the memory was so strong, until he looked down and realized his hands were smoking.

Up the stairs, right. He still stood, that helped. He put his weight on one leg but clutched back to the smoking hot shelf when it nearly buckled.  


Fine. Fine. This was fine. He took a deep breath and summoned a feeling of lightness, convinced himself that gravity had no power over him, and was gratified by the sensation of lifting off the ground--just a little, but enough to push himself off and toward the stair. 

He blinked. He was _not there_ for a little while, and found himself curled up in the tub, in the hottest water he could stand, a trail of clothes behind him, half wishing he could just cook himself but willing to settle for overwhelming every other sensation from his body. 

He rolled back in his head what had happened. How it went so wrong. Should’ve let Rabastan bleed out. Should have just killed him outright. No, lost your temper, hit him, hit him, hit him, again and again, and only then did you nail him with the Cruciatus and then finally the Killing Curse.

He had had no idea what Potter was thinking, for once, before parting. He told himself he didn’t care. But it stung. How quickly he, like everyone else, seemed to immediately assume the worst of him. 

Not Gawain, though, his mind supplied. He’d find out in the morning if Shacklebolt, a former auror himself, would overrule him. How he’d balance his own drive for justice--vengeance, really--with his efforts to clean up the ministry. Surely he should have some kind of hearing before the Wizenmagot, for this if not for everything else he’s done.

Hard to beat a man like that, even when you have the will to. He looked down at his hand. Split knuckle. The back of his palm almost purple, fingers swollen. Cold would be better, he thought, and submerged it in the hot water anyway. Such a muggle thing to do, hitting. The whole point of having a signature spell in duels was balancing the drawback of being predictable with being able to cast it dead on your feet exhausted, wandless, in desperation. You get the wand back and it’s a quick execution or escape from there.

He sunk deeper in the water. He tried to still his mind, to exist only in the present, in the heat, the  _ tap tap tap _ of the dripping faucet, but it didn’t work. All he saw was a tide of blood, colder than the water.

In the end he could only sprawl in the claw-foot tub and endure it.

He dutifully reported to the Ministry at 7:50am the next morning. He had addressed his knees, his broken hand, at least enough to be functional. He passed over his wand for weighing and congratulated himself for showing up so early, sleep be damned, as only a few heads pivoted to stare when the attendant announced his name.

He found himself back in the office of Gawain Robards, with a frowning Conrad Williamson (class of '89, another damn Gryffindor) lurking in the background. Shacklebolt was apparently too busy. He supposed that meant he was off the hook--if they were going to arrest a former headmaster of Hogwarts surely there’d be more Aurors involved.

They both let him speak without interruption. They did not pry into his relationship with Potter--they let it stand, let the autonomous quill roll.

Finally, Williamson handed him the parchment. Just as he’d thought, it balanced what he’d actually said with the official stance Robards had presented last night. It portrayed him just shy of vigilante, perhaps, but he had still done something they likely wished they could. He supposed this was a good thing. It would not be the first time he found himself doing something terrible that no one else could.

“Seem about right?” the head auror asked, handing him a regular quill.

He signed.

“You’re lucky we’re all trying to move on from the war. The further we get from it, the harder it's going to be to turn a blind eye to casting Unforgiveables on the streets of London. Even on Death Eaters as foul as Lestrange.”

"It was quite unplanned, I assure you," he deadpanned.

"Yes, well. Please let us know if you do happen to plan the next one. I believe we're done here. Let us know if you have any plans to relocate. And--congratulations on the retirement? 

“Conrad, would you escort Mr. Snape back to the atrium? And Mr. Snape,  _ please _ consider stopping by St. Mungo's. I can even call ahead and have them set aside a room for you."

He felt his lip curl. “Fine,” he said. If it gets you off my back, he thought.

Williamson had apparently cultivated some patience since he'd graduated. They were actually out of earshot of the office before he turned to Snape and hissed, “What were you thinking?  _ Bringing _ Harry into that scene. Let alone doing it in the first place. He's not even eighteen."

He stopped in the middle of the hall and fixed Conrad with a glare. “I did not have a surfeit of choices at the time, Mr Williamson. I would remind you that Potter has likely faced down Voldemort more times than any other living wizard and you would be remiss to underestimate his capabilities."

He shook his head. “I don't doubt him. But he didn't need to see what  _ you'd _ done. For some bloody reason you mean something to him.”

Severus turned his wince into a sneer and kept on toward the atrium.

A nurse came for him at the fireplace into the hospital, just as Gawain had said. He thought he could get used to this kind of service, if it weren’t for the cost. 

He wished he was surprised to see Petra, dressed in her everyday robes, in the small exam room where the nurse left him.  


"I heard your name while I was on my way out and my gut told me to turn right back around,” she said without preamble. “Was on a twelve hour shift and it ran a little long. If your goal has been to look worse every time I see you, Severus, well. Congratulations."

“Lovely to see you again too.”

“I’m sure it is but flattery won't get you out of this," she grinned. "Well. What’s the matter now?”

“Hand,” he said, raising it. “And knees. Broke my fall very effectively.”

“Unfortunate. Robe off, then. Trousers too. You can keep everything else on.” She twisted a dial on the wall behind her and the room immediately got a little warmer.

He raised an eyebrow but did as she said, rolling up the sleeve of the affected arm to boot. She touched his hand gently, finger by finger, then prodded at his knees as well. 

“Well, you definitely broke your fifth metacarpal. Can’t tell on the kneecaps but you may have fractured them as well. Skele-Gro will fix you right up, but I’d like to administer it here so I can make sure everything sets correctly. Let me go get some from the cart.”

She slipped out but came right back. He choked the potion down, as requested, and she made a satisfied little noise when the slight distortion in his palm and fingers corrected itself. He endured the ghastly feeling of her wiggling his kneecaps around for the welcome reward of being able to put his trousers back on. A general healing potion would take care of the swelling.

She dropped her chin and asked, “Anything else?”

He tilted his head and frowned at her, heart pounding. Did she know…?

But before he could incriminate himself, she prompted him: “The bite?”

He let out a sigh and loosened his collar. A frisson went down his spine at her fingertips exploring his throat. He grimaced and fought the impulse to twitch and draw back. 

“Did that hurt?” she asked absently, shifting to her wand.

“No.”

“Hm. Good. You have a lot of scar tissue here. Tickle in your throat?”

“Yes.”

“And are you still hyping yourself up with an Invigoration Draught in the mornings?”

He startled and she laughed.

“You won’t be the first. I don’t recommend it, though; as you’ve likely found, the energy doesn’t come for free. Don’t go cold turkey but you should think about weaning yourself off. I think we can do something about the internal scarring--I imagine you’ve noticed the tightness? But before that, you need to _rest_. You’re a powerful wizard but you have limits, and you very nearly reached them when you came back from the brink of death. I’m not exaggerating when I say that. We can do without you next month.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

He found the rum behind the vodka he saved for making pie dough. Severus couldn’t remember at first where it had come from--it was muggle, from the labeling. But his father’s taste ran more toward cheap gin, and his father hadn’t been in the house for a long time. Perhaps rum balls.

He wrapped his dough in waxed cloth and set it to chill and retrieved a lowball glass. It didn’t matter, in the end, where it had come from or when he had bought it.

It was too early in the day. But it burned down his throat and settled with a happy purr into his joints all the same. He had the feeling that he was welcoming in an old friend. One from adolescence that you know is no good for you but you remember fondly all the same. That’d been most of the people he would call ‘friend’, come to think of it, though he would now hesitate to call them even that. 

The pie would wait, he decided. He had all the time in the world to kill. He tried to read. First a muggle novel, then a collection of short stories. Finally he only continued to drink and craned his neck up at the ceiling again. Did he know a spell to paint ceilings? Perhaps he could tell McGonagall he changed his mind about the house elf, if the elf wasn’t too traumatized. He should owl her to tell her not to worry. He should owl Petra to let her know his plans for July.

He put this thought aside.

He abandoned the pretense of the glass and brought the whole bottle down to the basement, where his portrait had been waiting in the damp dark. He could barely make it out in just the light spilling down the stairs.

He sat before it anyway, in the old wooden chair he kept for when he was waiting for potions to simmer. He didn’t particularly want to see it, had regretted unwrapping it from the brown paper as soon as he’d done it, because he’d sat for it as a Death Eater, been painted as a Death Eater. He didn’t need to see the sneer on his face, the pushed-up sleeves showing off the grinning skull with its snake tongue.

He wished he’d had more time with it. Circumstances had not allowed, of course. He’d had to wait until the dead of night, or else he’d have to speak to it like a good little Death Eater. He needed to be relatively sure of privacy as he explained his own teaching methodology, his perspective as a wartime headmaster. The difficulty of allowing for the greater good to be served. Watching Muggleborns vanish and saying nothing.  


But some things he had not even allowed himself to think in the dead of night.

“A red flag,” he began, “is a family history. Deaths in the family. Not wanting to go home for break. Any sudden change in grades. If they are reckless, insist on throwing themselves into danger. Giving away belongings, particularly those that are precious to them. Do not just send them to the infirmary overnight and tell them to buck up in the morning, and explain to them why they are being irrational.

“Consider child-proofing the castle. Err more on the side of caution. So many ways to die. Crushed by a moving staircase. Merlin, everything about the Forbidden Forest. All the bloody towers. There has to be a better solution. Not a problem for me, of course. I can fly. 

"Definitely don’t do another Triwizard, what rot that was. Bloody miracle Diggory was the only one who croaked and that it took Voldemort to happen, though with all the bloody cheating what can you expect.”

He stopped. Swirled the rum in the bottle--had he gone through three quarters already? Damn. Well. Easier when one starts early. Best thing would be to finish it, keep it from spoiling, yes?  


“Remember that they are only children.”

He lapsed into silence. The bottle thumped to the floor and slid away. He slept for a while, a shallow, useless sleep as it always was when he was drunk, but he did not dream, and that was a mercy.

He woke to pitch-black, an aching neck, and an aching head. Still half-drunk. He lit his wand--surely not too much magic--and burrowed in his cupboard for a bottle of hangover cure. He had made a big batch after a particularly brutal Yule party at the Malfoy’s, back when things had been calm enough that Yule parties were still something people cared about.  


Then he pulled out the lockbox from the back.

He sat in the kitchen. The waning moon was close enough yet to full that he didn’t need to turn on the lights, magic or electric. He rolled a green and silver swirled marble in his hand. 

This one was just a marble. His mother had given him a set as a small child, when losing a gobstones match likely would have sparked a tantrum. A shooter embedded with a Hogwarts crest; eight with the house animals, two per house; the rest plain in house colors. He'd come home after fifth year and figured out how to grind the lions and the scarlet and gold ones to dust.

She'd given him a set of Bernie Bott's Anniversary Gobstones, too, when he'd turned eleven. It shot out a different scented liquid every time you lost a point. Like the candy, sometimes it was pleasant and sometimes you’d smell like rotten cat food for a bit. But it turned out that he didn’t need to give his classmates another reason to make fun of him, Gobstones being what it was, so it had stayed in the bottom of his school trunk. Likely it was up in the attic still.

Whichever, she’d always been enthusiastic at first. Eager to share something from her own childhood with her son. But then the shine would fade, and she would fade with it, and he’d be begging her for a game. For any attention at all. But she was tired. Always tired. Too tired to cook, often, to his father’s frustration. Too tired for laundry.

He was just being maudlin. Perhaps the last of the rum leaving his system.

He found he didn’t much care about the rest of his belongings. He’d registered a will with Gringott’s ages ago bequeathing anything worthwhile to Hogwarts, and his library was adequately organized already. And Potter wasn’t due for a few days, if he even showed at all.

There were only two potions on the counter. Petra had been right, he didn’t need a whole pharmacy.

Before, corralling the Carrow twins, guarding his thoughts, guarding his back against his former allies in the Order, that had demanded enough of his attention. No rest for the wicked. But now? For the first time since he’d been a much younger man, he faced an endless summer, with nothing to go back to in the fall.

He could occupy himself with baking, over and over again, the same recipe, until he'd gotten it just right, taking a sample and then Vanishing the rest. With reading, when he wasn't sloshed. With this little project at St. Mungo’s, and, if he was honest, with Potter. Fixing what he could. But it wasn’t enough, was it? To distract from the itch under his skin, the way his mind begged for mercy from itself.

One bottle was a Draught of Peace. One was a cough potion.

He knew how to brew each of them perfectly. Had done so, over and over again, until he’d gotten it just right. But these two were not right.

The Draught was supposed to be a lovely, soft turquoise, wafting silvery smoke. It was stoppered, but he knew the smoke would be oily and black, the color a deep muddy green. He wouldn’t expect to wake up. The cough potion looked correct but smelled off, like mildewed winter hay. His diaphragm would first spasm, and then still, unless he took the antidote.

He did not have the antidote. For either. It was not an oversight.

He was tired. He felt more respect for his mother now. He hadn’t understood. He’d been angry. But she’d made it all the way to forty-eight. He couldn’t imagine ten more years of this.

He heard a thump from the basement. A series of them. He sighed, then went down one step at a time. So tired.

"What?" he snapped, raising his lit wand.

His portrait glared back at him and settled against the wall. How had he looked so well-rested a year ago?

"You god-damned coward, I know what you're doing up there."

"Oh?”

"I'm enough of you to know you were up there looking at those bloody potions, and I have an idea of that they are because you got them out of the lockbox where we keep the nasty stuff."

"Where I keep the nasty stuff," he said evenly. "You are an object."

"And that makes it worse. I am a soulless artifact that you have fed only scraps of yourself and even I know this is a cowardly, selfish decision."

The portrait held up a marble. “You know what this could do to him. What kind of example you would set. You know this could destabilize him.”

His eyes burned. “And what if I don't care?”

“I'm just a portrait,” it parroted back to him. “I am what you feed me. I can hear you down here, talking to him. I wouldn't have this in the first place if you did not care.”

“You’re wrong,” he choked out, and knocked the painting flat on its face.

There were two bottles up on his kitchen counter. Either one of them would likely kill him. It wouldn’t take long for both of them together. And it would be a far easier death than he deserved.  


He went back up. He pulled both stoppers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another update! And... another cliffhanger. Sorry about that. Last chapter soon!
> 
> I'm most of the way through a rough draft and working on fleshing some parts out and refining the rest. Depending on how cooperative my day job is, I should be able to post by the end of the week, and the epilogue will immediately follow. 
> 
> The last chapter is shaping up to be quite a bit shorter than both this one and Chapter Seven ended up. If anybody has any special requests for Things for Harry to Do, now's the time. Aside from maybe paying Snape a visit ASAP.


	10. Chapter Nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry wondered if it was too early to call. He faced another day of seminars and practicals, however, and he didn’t think he’d get a chance to borrow a fireplace until lunch. And he couldn’t place why, but something told him not to wait until the weekend. Hermione’d had a point, and even if it was already Friday, this whole thing had started Wednesday night.

Harry wondered if it was too early to call. He faced another day of seminars and practicals, however, and he didn’t think he’d get a chance to borrow a fireplace until lunch. And he couldn’t place why, but something told him not to wait until the weekend. Hermione’d had a point, and even if it was already Friday, this whole thing had started Wednesday night.

He Flooed Snape’s house, crouched down, and stuck his head into the fire, grimacing against the vertigo.

“Hello?” he called to the empty room, feeling ridiculous. “Sorry, are--are you awake? It’s Harry.”

He wondered what the etiquette of fire-calling was for wizards. Somehow he hadn’t asked that yet. He was treating it like a muggle telephone but it’s a bit more invasive, he thought to himself, skimming the bookshelves for the umpteenth time. He imagined Snape crouching upstairs, pretending not to be home.

Harry was just about to throw caution to the wind and actually cross over when Snape finally slouched in from the kitchen, looking wrinkled and wan in what appeared to be yesterday’s clothes.

Harry made a split-second decision. He’d just meant to ask after him, but--

“Can I come in? Are you busy?”

Snape looked around the house, lingering on something behind him in the kitchen.

“No,” he said slowly. “I don’t suppose I am.”

“Right, good. Um. One minute.”

Harry pulled his head back out and dashed a memo to Robards on a scrap of parchment.  _ Personal day--will explain later. _ He folded it up and muttered the spell to send it off, then jumped back into the fireplace before either of them could change their mind.

But Snape was right where he’d left him, looking dazed, a mug in hand. He blinked and seemed to snap back to the present to usher Harry into the kitchen. He thumped down on one of the chairs.

“Never been much for a full spread,” he mumbled, adding a little milk to his coffee. He pointed at a half-full french press on the chipped laminate counter behind him. “Get a mug from the drainboard if you like.”

Harry grabbed it. He noticed it was otherwise empty save a whiskey glass and two potion bottles, already dry, and this bothered him.

“Do you usually drink coffee in the morning? I never noticed it at breakfast before.”

Snape frowned. “Is that really you, Potter? That’s entirely too observant.”

“I have my moments.”

Snape snorted and took a long gulp. He seemed to visibly come back into himself, and Harry thought that he couldn’t be doing that badly if he was still making back-handed compliments. He loaded his own cup with sugar and milk and wondered how much he had to drink to be polite.

“Now. What’s so urgent that you’ve gone to the trouble of skiving off work on a Friday morning to come here?”

He shrugged and didn’t meet Snape’s eyes. “I’ve been feeling a little off since the other night.”

“Not surprising.” He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry.”

Harry just shrugged again. “S’pose I’ve seen worse. I’m--I should apologize to _you_. I assumed…”

“Not without reason.”

“Yeah well. Doesn’t excuse it.”

“Is that what you came here for?” Snape looked bemused. “Apologies?”

“Not... exactly.” He bit his lip. Honesty had worked with Ron and Hermione. 

“Actually, I wanted to see how you were. Before work. And then I figured--maybe don’t have this conversation with my arse hanging out of a fireplace in the Ministry? But this is, what, your second near-death experience in as many months?”

“I’m fine.”

He said it like it was a threat, with an obstinate jut of his lower jaw.

Snape did not look fine.

He took a deep breath.

“I don’t think that’s true, actually. I don’t think that’s been true any of the times you’ve said it. It was--what happened, whatever I thought, you can’t just be  _fine_ .”

Snape rolled his neck with audible popping noises, but clearly the gesture was just as much about rolling his eyes as gratuitously as possible. “You came to my house at 8:30 in the morning to call me a liar?”

“Only if you keep lying.”

“Would you like to get fired for trespassing?” he spat back. “I know you’re already building a case for absenteeism but you’ve always been ambitious in your defiance of authority.”

Harry reared back and opened his mouth--and then shut it again. If he lost his temper and stormed off, he’d just be leaving Snape alone again. He remembered the look on his face and thought maybe that wasn’t such a good idea. Right. Tactical retreat.

“Look, I’m sorry, that came out wrong. I just--I’ll drop it.”

Snape stared at him like he didn’t understand what he was seeing. Then slumped a little in his chair.

“So. What is this potion I’ve been taking all summer?”

“I wondered when you would get curious enough to ask about that,” he said darkly.

“Hermione gets the credit, actually.”

His brows shot up. “You told her?”

“And Ron.”

“And?” Snape leaned forward.

“Wasn’t as bad as I expected. I think it’ll be better, the next time. I think they’ll help.”

“Good. That’s good. Well.” He took a deep, shaky breath and straightened his posture. “The potion. Never bothered with a name. I can tell you it’s based on the Elixir to Induce Euphoria. I’m sure Granger noticed. 

“I didn't come up with it until 1984. My father had my mother committed. She--struggled, similarly. The muggles gave her something called Tryptizol. A flawed precursor to Prozac. It helped. For a while. And it was very trendy for wizards to take the euphoria recreationally in the 80’s. I moderated its influence and tried to extend its duration. A nudge, not a rocket. Something to lift one’s baseline mood to a more normal level and enable one to get on with it.”

Harry saw his opening.

“So why aren’t you taking it now?”

Snape froze, mug halfway to his mouth. He put it back down.  _Direct hit_ .

“I did, for a long time. I had a good few years. Then it wasn’t necessary. And I found I preferred as few outside influences as possible when occluding.”

“That’s not what I asked though. You didn't answer me. Why aren’t you taking it now?”

“I take lots of things, Potter. They don't all get along.”

Harry raised his eyebrows and leaned back in his chair. “I can wait.”

“Why do you need to know so badly?” Snpe scowled. “Worried your own head will pop off?”

“Sure. If that’s what you want to think.”

“There’s nothing wrong with tapering off and then starting again later, if you feel like you need it again. I haven’t. Felt like I needed it.”

“It would be alright if you did, though, wouldn’t it? Unless you’ve been trying to poison me all summer and I’ve just called your bluff.” Harry smiled, trying to soften the words. “That was Ron’s theory. Anyway, Hermione thinks you should patent it. She wanted to get a look at the recipe.”

“She would,” Snape muttered. “Fine. Give me a chance to transcribe it and my notes and I’ll send it to her.”

He remembered what Conrad had said. He certainly wasn’t a seer, but again, something pushed him to say, “I’ll stop by for it, actually. Tomorrow afternoon? If that’s alright with you.”

A look Harry couldn’t parse passed over Snape’s face as he said, “Alright.”

Harry didn’t bother going back to work. Even if it turned out he couldn’t lean on being The Boy Who Lived for a three-day weekend for a very good cause (though he really shouldn’t make it a habit), that was Monday Harry’s problem. He spent most of the day at Gringott’s anyway, being shuffled from one goblin to the next, filling out forms and then filling them out again when one contradicted another. 

He imagined they might’ve still been sore about the break-in, but it was still his vault.

And it was worth it in the end, because what he hadn’t realized in all those quick trips for petty cash was that Fleamont and Euphemia Potter valued, above all else, their son James, and they had kept an absolutely dizzying array of his childhood belongings packed away in trunks. He even found a Nimbus 1001 tucked into a far corner. He made plans with Ginny for the following weekend to go flying together, to test it out, and then… maybe he’d tell her about how he’d been. 

Definitely after flying, though, because he figured she might hex him the next time he tried to get more than a few feet off the ground.

He didn’t think about Snape for whole minutes at a time.

He finally Apparated to Spinner’s End earlier than they’d originally planned--but no. 

He’d given Snape a time, and he’d rushed and gotten there an hour early, and  _ shouldn’t he not be able to do that? _ He whipped out his wand and crashed into the door and it was exactly what he’d feared, the shelves half empty, books piled everywhere, a dark figure...

Snape turned around slowly, hands raised.

“I thought we cleared this up already, Potter,” he said, as if he was not being held at wandpoint  _again_ .

“I thought. Jesus.” Harry dropped his arm and looked around the room.

The shelves were half empty, yes, but the books were neatly packed into boxes. Snape still held one dusty volume. The curtains were folded and placed neatly on the armchair. Snape himself still looked like he hadn’t been sleeping but there was a core of stillness, of calm, to him that had been lacking before.

“What’s all this?”

“I’m moving. McGonagall suggested I retire to Spain,” Snape said archly. “I believe she was joking but a change is likely overdue. Here.”

He handed Harry a length of parchment filled with his spidery, cramped handwriting and copied arithmancy tables. His notes. And then half of a torn photograph, and one page of a worn, yellowed letter.

“I think this is better left with you as well. Did you--you found the half? In Black’s bedroom?”

Harry took it gingerly. “I did.”

“Good.” He frowned at the artifacts for a moment, as if debating snatching them back, then shook his head. “For the potion, I’ve given you the core ingredients and instructions as well as my notes. It’s best tweaked for the arithmatic name-value of the drinker. I’ve left my adjustments for you. I don’t doubt you can handle it. When you deigned to focus, your performance was always adequate in my classes.”

Harry’s heart pounded in his ears. He hardly heard a word Snape said because Proudfood had passed out pamphlets, hadn’t he? Thursday, before they all left. Warning signs.

“I’m not stupid,” he croaked. “You say adequate but you’ve always treated me like an idiot. I thought maybe after all this you’d changed but you must still think so because I’m not buying it, that you’re just. Moving to bloody Spain.”

Snape’s eyes darted around the room.

“I changed my mind,” Harry insisted. “I don’t even want the recipe. Why would I want anyone but the best making it?” He held it back out. “If you’re really moving to Spain you’ll just have to keep owling it to me. Unless you’re lying again.”

“Back to this as well? I don’t know what you mean, Potter.” 

“That’s rubbish and you know it.” He clenched his hands, wet with sweat, at his sides, and found that he could not stop once he had started. “Just like yesterday. You don’t want to admit anything’s wrong because you don’t think you deserve the help. And you don’t think you deserve it because you have this need to see yourself as a bad person, because it’s fine if you’re a bad person who has done some good. You’ve ‘exceeded expectations’.

“But if you’re a good person who has done all these shite, terrible fucking things, then you’re just… just not good enough. You’re just disappointing. And you can’t stand that, can you? Well. It’s too bad. 

“You’re just a person, Snape. A person who has done bad things, and good things, and you don’t need to turn yourself inside out in penance but you also can’t do this to me! I won’t have it! Everyone leaves me and it’s not fair!”

“Potter!” Snape advanced on him, grabbed him by the arm with a bruising grip. His face was stone. “Get a hold of yourself.”

Harry drew in a gasping breath and wiped his face, trying to brace himself for calling in an emergency, duelling the other man if he has to, to drag him in. He tried--not very hard--to pull away. 

And then Snape plucked away the length of scroll and stepped back.

"Fine. But you must fix the hole in my yard.”

“W-what?”

Snape gestured out toward the back door, beyond the kitchen. “The Fiendfyre. Bad for resale value. I was going to fix it myself but perhaps you can save me the trouble since it was your bloody idea in the first place.”

He paused, then continued, looking almost embarrassed, “I really am just moving. I’ve secured a cottage in Dorset until September.”

Harry collapsed onto the sofa. “Jesus.”

Snape pressed his lips together. He rounded the sofa and sat down, facing the floor, hands folded between his knees. His hair curtained his face. They sit together for a minute. Then two.

“Harry.” He swallowed audibly. “You’re not wrong.”

He didn’t dare interrupt.

“I have been trapped,” he goes on, gingerly, selecting each word with care, “in a very unpleasant mindset. Not just this summer, though this certainly hasn’t been my finest. And I have very effectively isolated myself--it was conducive to my cover as a spy, made it less work, but it is admittedly less than ideal otherwise.”

He tilted his head toward Harry, face still hidden.

“You’ve handled yourself admirably. Far better than I would have, obviously. I think leaving Cokesworth, maybe even leaving England, is something I need to do in order to become ‘just a person’, as you say.”

“You’re not--” the words strangled him.

“Going to kill myself?”

He finally brushed his hair aside and looked up at Harry, eyes glittering. Not with malice. “I don’t think I can promise you that. Not if you don’t want me to lie. But I don’t plan on it.”

“You’ll keep in touch at least? You’d--you’d let me know if--”

“I don’t know if that’s wise,” he says carefully. “But I will reach out to  _someone_ . And you can always reach out to me.”

Harry let out his breath in a rush.

“Is that all? Is that really all? You can’t promise… That’s bollocks. All the hoops you’ve had me jump through, and I feel better, but, and you’re just going to ‘reach out to someone’?”

Harry thought he really was going mad because he could swear he heard an echo of Snape’s laughter wafting up from the open trick-door to the stair.

“ _Fine_. I will make arrangements with a healer. Does that satisfy your highness? I’m twice your age, for Merlin’s sake.”

He took a deep breath.

“It’s a start.”


	11. after

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harry thinks it’s funny that muggles call depression the black dog, given his personal history. He tries to remember that when it circles back around to him--he had thought himself haunted, hunted, once, but in the end, it was only family he didn’t know he had.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Nine and the epilogue are going up at the same time, so make sure you aren't missing the last chapter!

Harry thinks it’s funny that muggles call depression the black dog, given his personal history. He tries to remember that when it circles back around to him--he had thought himself haunted, hunted, once, but in the end, it was only family he didn’t know he had.

He is content most days. Some days transcendentally happy, of course.

And yet.

He will see it at the far reaches of his vision, and wonder when it will be back. He sends off an owl for help when he thinks it’s drawing near, and sometimes that’s enough to drive it off. Sometimes he rounds a corner and it comes barrelling out of the darkness and it catches him by the throat, and then he thinks _this is it_. Sometimes it only holds him with a retriever’s soft mouth and then lets him go, as if to remind him of how fragile life is, how quickly he could lose it, how much he still has to be grateful for.

He still carries the old marble with a snake at its heart. He remembers that the Dark Marks, which had been created in part by the Protean Charm, like the marble, had faded upon Voldemort’s death. 

So he finds it comforting to roll it around in his palm, to carry it like a worry stone. He had the thought, once, that maybe Snape gave him the original, and it would stay in his pocket no matter what. But it’s still layered in spellwork, and he can’t imagine all that lasting much beyond its creator’s death.

He’s still immensely relieved every time the magnificent eagle owl visits. Even if it’s impatient and nippy, like its master, and shows up with no set schedule. Sometimes it brings a short letter: “Beaches are teeming. Still nicer than England.” “Saw your wife’s first byline. Tell her her writing has improved.” “Neither of you should be allowed to name anyone or anything. Congratulations.”

Sometimes it’s just a package: sweets for the kids. Books, often, that Harry gamely tries to read and sometimes even finishes before passing them off to Hermione. (He thinks they’re usually really meant for her. It’s one of his goals to get them to mend fences for good.) 

When they’d bought the house, a package of black-hearted anemone bulbs showed up that bloomed in a riot of colors in the early spring. When Al was just turning six, it was a vintage Gobstones set, Bernie Bott’s themed--sometimes the loser gets blasted with something foul, but sometimes it’s something pleasant, like apricot or honey. The uncertainty is half the fun.

He still wishes Snape would give more notice when he’s back in England and plans to stop by.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whooo boy. Thank you all so much for coming on this journey with me, and for all the support--it’s meant a lot as I’ve gotten this admittedly difficult story out of my head, especially as I did not expect to write anything more than a one-shot based on a wild head-canon about the Astronomy Tower. 
> 
> I may or may not be back with more, related or not, now that we're in a post-COVID world and I have all this time I'm no longer spending commuting, but we'll see! <3

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to mishaberlioz for the CC! They were a huge help in getting me to re-think the early structure of this piece in a way that made it stronger overall.
> 
> I also regret that this is now necessary to say, but... trans rights are human rights.


End file.
